Gallifrey, The Long way Round'
by TotroCat
Summary: A from the heart FanFic about Clara and Ashildr as they travel through time and space. What do the two immortals get up to in their very own TARDIS with the whole wide universe to explore? The woman who has seen it all, and the woman who will have never seen enough. Posting as frequently as possible, at least once a month if not more.
1. CH 1: The Intruder with the Ghastly eyes

_**Hello! This is my little FanFic about Clara Oswald's wiggle room with Ashildr. I really miss Clara, and though i know many people disliked her, i thought I'd let myself enjoy writing this for myself and anyone who cares to read it. I hope you Enjoy my tails about these to beans traveling through time and space! Please excuse any flaws. feedback is always welcome. (Side note: this first chapter is a little silly, i wrote it on a long road trip and later decided it was good enough to continue with more chapters.)**_

 _ **-Skwick**_

* * *

 **Chapter 1 The Intruder with the Ghastly eyes:**

"Clara! There's an intruder in the TARDIS!" Ashildr called over her shoulder to her friend in the control room. Her hands were full with a stack of her journals which they had just rescued from being burned somewhere, somewhen, by the end of the universe. She took a cautious step towards the small creature that stood on four legs in-between Ashildr and the TARDIS door. It must have gotten into their TARDIS within the last few minutes, because Ash had just gotten back with the last load of books, and it wasn't there before.

She had to lean down to examine the furry beast, and she scowled at it when instead of cowering at Ash's superior height and size, it simply squeaked at her, showing small fangs in its pink mouth.

"What was that, Me? Did you say intruder?!" Clara pocked her head out of the console room to pear at Ashildr. Her voice was worried- both of them knew that nothing gets into a TARDIS.

"Yes." She addressed the other woman with a dismissive tone for interrupting her interaction with the strange animal.

"State your name, species and reason for entering our establishment. We are time-travelers from far beyond the stars and you are in one of the most powerful ships in the universe. Tread carefully." Ashildr spoke with the brisk authority she used whenever she needed to be in charge of a situation. She eyed the furry creature with suspicion as it ignored her and wandered around the diner.

"Me…." Clara came up behind Ashildr and brushed passed her. Approaching the animal with a bemused look on her face, she continued "...Me, that's a cat."

"A cat...? like the earth animal known for having taken over ancient Egypt? That's what cats look like?" Ashildr straightened and set her stack of books on the diner bar.

"Taking over Egypt?" Clara scoped up the cat, who protested loudly before realizing being in Clara's arms entailed chin rubs and being fussed over. The younger woman turned back to her traveling companion and smirked at the still unimpressed look on her face.

"You've seen cats before! You are an ancient immortal who has lived on earth for most of its life- I'm sure in in all that time a cat has crossed your path." Clara pointed out.

"Well we are on an alien planet! How am I supposed to know cats hang about places other than their home planet- the are not exactly a world-conquering species! ...are they?" She pauses for a moment before shaking her head and continuing. "How did it get here, and furthermore, how did it get in the TARDIS?" she puzzled with hands on her hips, hiding how silly she felt for having been concerned over earth pet-animal. Although, her journals did say that cats had taken complete control  
of Egypt very easily…

"And yes," she added grumpily as Clara snuggled the intruder "of course I have seen cats before. …Apparently-" She glanced at the last stack of book that still waited to be carried into her new library. "I have encountered them many times. Just not in the last hundred-fifty years, which is about how long I can keep an image of such an unimportant thing in my mind. Re-reading my experiences with them, I see I hadn't done a very good job of capturing their ghastly, sharp gaze, and killer claws." Ashildr noticed the claws she was referring to as they dug into Clara's thick sweater-sleeve as a result of her pets and baby-voicing.

"Don't listen to her! You don't have _ghastly_ eyes. You are just a big sweetie, aren't you?" Clara spoke to the cat, but aimed her words at the shorter Immortal. Ashildr crossed her arms and glared at the animal who held her companion's affections. She took a few steps closer to the two and sighed at the mock hurt Clara showed in her eyes that was accompanied by a pouty lip. (From Clara- not the cat.)

"Are you sure it's not an alien that just looks like a cat?" Ashildr still felt the need to defend her over-reaction to a cat in the TARDIS. And, as Clara couldn't stop sing-songing, 'except the unexpected!' She wouldn't take chances on the security of their ship or the safety of Clara. "How, I ask again, did it- "

"Not _it_ Me, he's a _he_." Clara corrected. Ashildr rolled her eyes.

"How did _he_ get in here? Not even most creatures that actually HAVE HANDS can, unless they have a key." As she spoke Ash reached into her leather jacket and wrapped her fingers around her TARDIS key that lived on a chain around her neck. She kept it there to remind her of the silent promise she'd made to herself, and to Clara, the moment she'd agreed to accompany her on her (rather long) journey to Gallifrey. A promise to stand by Clara, and protect her as she had once not been able to do so long ago when she had told the doctor she would. It was Ashildr's power that had lead to Clara's death. Even though she didn't all together blame herself for her inevitable fait, she would always carry some guilt for her part in it, and her inability to keep her away from harm as she had said she would. Holding the key in her hand, Ashildr wondered about how long she would get would get to spend with Clara, and worried about what would happen if she again failed to keep her safe.

Fixed points could be re-written, even if it means the universe collapses on itself, they could. Which, Ash dreaded to think, meant Clara could still be hurt and even affectively _killed_ before she faced her last heartbeat.

Clara's immortality was that of an all-together unique flavor, very different than her own. Ashildr didn't know how much it would take to kill herself, but over her wild and extraordinarily long life she'd had enough close calls that by now she assumed it would take no less that decapitation to kill her well enough that the Mire medical chip couldn't repair her.

Un-aware of her companion's morbid thoughts, Clara continued their conversation still holding the cat. Now a little more wary of him from Ashildr's remark about alien cats, she said "I- I guess we DON'T know it's a real cat… I mean," she placed the cat on the ground, and he sat, looking up at the two women. "It could be a look-alike..."

"Yes- exactly." Ashildr was snapped out of her thoughts at Clara's words, and she fell back into action mode easily. "The TARDIS might have let him in if she saw him as no threat, and wants us to help him find his way home." Maybe it wasn't a threat. "Isn't that our job now? To serve and protect all creatures of the universe?" she said almost seriously. Clara spat a mock glare at her for the way she made TARDIS adventures sound silly.

"Don't say it like that! I thought we left the mocking air at Deltaray-Joy's third moon a few days ago?" Clara said with a teasing smile. It was Ashildr's turn to glare. Clara was wordlessly bringing up the incident that lead to the unwanted loss of Ashildr's superior air around Clara. Which, in fact, had happened during their fourth adventure together when Ash was forced to recognize her friend's ability to handle not only herself, but also aliens that wanted to eat the two young women who'd shown up at their doorstep. That was the day Clara had earned a respect from Ash that was more powerful than the amount she had been granted through the many re-readings of Ashildr's adventure with the mire so very long ago.

"Mrow?" came a soft purr from the third being in the diner, breaking up the glaring contest that had filled the space between them. The two women giggled, all thoughts of imposter cats and human-eating aliens put on hold so they could share that moment of joy. Ashildr had done more laughing, (and running,) since she had started traveling with Clara than she had done in a very long time. The women who had shown her what it was to be brave when Ashildr was just a child, had now re-taught her what it was to be happy after so many billion years of being alone.

Clara's giggles had finally subsided into a wide smile that challenged Ashildr to add anything to her remark about their adventure on Deltaray-Joy's moon. If she'd had a good comeback then, she would have used it anyway, despite not wanting to cause an argument, but she didn't, so she just bit her lip and tilted her head at Clara in defeat. Clara raised her chin, proud of herself, and Ashildr noticed that she was blushing a little.

Satisfied that she had won that round of teasing, Clara turned her attention back to the animal that was rubbing its body on her legs. "So, I think- "

A loud "Knock, Knock, Knock!" sounded at the diner door causing Clara to jump. (Not Ashildr though- she had gotten over spooking at noises a long time ago.) She felt her body shift ever so slightly into the familiar fighting stance from lessons she had long ago forgotten. She was confident after so many years of practice that no one could tell the difference in her Posture, or the slight relaxing of her shoulders that meant she was on high alert.

Clara had already whirled around at the sound, and Ash turned her head to the potential threat as well. The Cat at Clara's heels hissed at the figure standing outside their door.

It was a tall person, dressed in a dark cloak and baggy jeans. The person was presumably male, and presumably an alien native to… whatever planet Clara had brought them to since the collection of Ashildr's journals.

Nether immortal moved, both expecting the other react first. With a quick glance to Clara she saw that her companion wasn't going to start the conversations. "Hello?" Ashbegan. She made no effort to move toward the glass door as she was sure by the giant ears atop the alien's head that he'd be able to hear her from her spot next to Clara.

"Yes- hello! Ladies, I think you have my beastie!"

By Clara's estimate, she and Ashildr had been traveling for a little over two weeks, and that time, The Doctor was the only other person who'd stepped foot in their diner. How had the cat gotten in? she looked up at the TARDIS's ceiling where she always did when trying to work out the young spaceship's intentions. "What have you brought us this time?" she whispered, shaking her head as Ashildr greeted the man at the door.

"This is your cat? it just showed up in the diner." Ash seemed wary of the alien so Clara walked a little closer to her and continued "We didn't know there were cats on this planet." The man stood stiffly, towering over the two time-travelers and paying them no attention at all. He pushed past Ashildr and walked up to Clara's new feline friend. Clara noted that Ashildr let the man's rudeness go, and continued on as if he hadn't pushed her.

The tabby growled at him as he approached and Clara would have stepped over to help the man fetch the cat, but Ashildr shot her a glance and shook her head. Clara didn't get why Ash was acting oddly, but she trusted her enough to deal with their guest and so she let her do just that.

"Yes… my cat." said the man in a silky voice.

"your pet?" Ashildr walked back over to the feline who stood its ground in front of her, still quietly growling at his owner. Clara wondered what this alien had done to earn such fowl language from the cat.

The way the alien growled back made Clara think that the relationship between the tabby and man might be less friendly and more… like prey and hunter. "Um…" she trailed off, not knowing what to say to an alien whose dinner looked like Clara's childhood pet.

"We don't mean any trouble, you can just take it and go." Ashildr held her palms out in front of her and looked back at Clara as a warning to 'Leave it, Clara,' when she saw that the taller woman was about to protest. Clara stocked up to stand by Ash's side and she crossed her arms as the man tried, and failed, to pick up the cat.

Clara did just that, and the Cat seemed happy to be closer to eyelevel with his opponent. "Give it to me." The man spoke in short, snarling sentences, and Clara decided his species was not one of great intelligence. She actually didn't know what planet they were on, she had set the TARDIS to random for an adventure after collecting all Ashildr's books.

Clara didn't want to give up the cat to the man, she was not convinced he would survive the day if she did. She turned to Ashildr with a pleading look. Ash Sighed, and Clara smiled, knowing she'd won. "What are you going to do with him?" Ashildr started to casually round the Alien as Clara spoke, keeping its attention.

"Soup. Beastie got away before." He licked his lips and reached for the cat. Clara stepped back but he grabbed her arm painfully hard. She struggled and before she could say anything Ashildr hit him in the back of the head with one of her big Books. Clara jumped out of the way as he fell face first onto the ground, out cold.

"Thanks, I- "

"You are NOT keeping a cat in the TARDIS!" Ashildr cut her off before she could suggest such a thing.

Clara scoffed." You won't even let me thank you for saving this innocent cat from the pot? I wasn't going to suggest that we keep it…"

"Like heck you weren't!" Ash put down her book and crossed her arms in front of Clara.

Clara just smirked because, yes, she had been about to suggest just that. She stepped closer and plopped the Cat in Ashildr's arms.

"Look at that face, Me! He just wants to travel through time and space! Is that so much to ask?" Clara pleaded. Ashildr put down the cat and it wandered over to one of the booths, hoped up onto it, and curled up on the table. He watched with one eye open as the two ladies talked.

"You," Ash Pointed at the cat, "we'll get to you later." Clara hid her smile, knowing she'd be keeping the cat.

"We should get the TARDIS out of here before he wakes up. We can dematerialize and leave him behind." Clara said turning back to Ash who had picked up her stack of books again.

"Yeah. I'll get us out of here." She started to walk back to the control room.  
"Alright, I'll make us some tea- those were a lot of books!" Clara walked behind the counter. "You are SO British!" Ashildr teased over her shoulder before disappearing inside the back room.


	2. CH 2: Call me Ashildr

_**Talk of TORCHWOOD and familiar faces!**_

 _ **-skwick**_

* * *

 **Chapter 2 - Call me Ashildr:**

"It was an awful lot of books, but not as many as I was thinking. When you said that you wanted I get all your journals which hold all the stories of your life, I thought we were talking billions." Clara sat perched on one of the bar chairs with Ashildr across from her.

"Hm." She said softly, and Clara leaned a little closer. "Bigger on the inside." Ash smiled. "Really?! How did you pull that off?- it's timelord technology!" Clara's eyes widened and she eagerly waited for Ash's story.

"Do you know about TORCHWOOD?" Ash asked. Clara nodded. "Only a little. The doctor told me that they work with UNIT to fight aliens they way he does, but they are humans based on earth."

"Yes. Apparently when I met the doctor for the second time in the 1600s, he warned me about another immortal he'd created, and I decided to seek him out. I found him in the 21st century. Captain Jack and I were friends for a long time…" She was visibly trying very hard to remember. "But I think when I left earth for the first time he wouldn't come with me. Anyway- that's not important. During one of his adventures with the doctor- I don't remember the details- he came to have a case that was bigger on the inside. He and his crew (with my help) were able to track down the exact components to make a large box fit inside a little box. He didn't want to make the tech saying it would 'mess with human's evolution' or something, but I convinced him to let me make my journals bigger on the inside so I'd be able to keep my memories with me, however many I gained. There are one hundred. It took me a very long time to transcribe all of the normal books I had into a timelord one, but when I did what I had took up very little room. Today, there are three and a half left blank."

"Wow! That's crazy that there was another immortal." Clara was fascinated by her companion's stories.

"In the universe, there…" She trailed off. "WERE for me, ARE for you, nine human-immortals. I've met seven of them, two live together hidden from the world and I've only heard of them." Ashildr looked very distant. Like she was trying to hold a kite of people she'd known with her mind but the winds of her long long life kept trying to take it away. "None of them were like me… I know that jack didn't even forget his memories the way I do." She said bitterly. "Four of us were the doctor's fault. I don't even think he knows about-" she cut herself off and glanced nervously at Clara.

"It's ok, you don't have to tell me." Ashildr shared a small smile of gratitude and idly stroked the cat who had hoped onto the bar and curled up between the two women.

Clara caught Ashildr's eye and pointedly looked at the her hand petting the cat. "Looks like you've made a friend after all." Ash scrunched up her nose and pulled her hand away. "Oscar pushes his head under my hand and I pet him without even thinking about it. You can't blame me- doesn't mean we are keeping him." She said defensively.

" _Oscar?_ You named the cat?" Clara smiled wide. "I want it ok recorded that it wasn't _me_ who named him. Once you name an animal you have to keep it!" Ash rolled her eyes- an action that made her look even more like a teenager than she already did. Clara was very surprised Oscar had been able to win over the immortal so quickly.

"Which records would you like to access?"

A monotone male voice said from behind Clara's shoulder. Her eyes widened and she felt her throat tighten. _That voice._ She shot up to her feet and turned around quickly. She couldn't believe what she saw- she tried to reach out to him but her arm wouldn't move. She was frozen.

"Danny?" She managed to say. Danny just stood there looking blankly past both of them.

"Who's Danny, Clara? Who is that?" Ashildr questioned frantically.

"I am not Danny Pink. I am the Voice interface." Clara's heart sank and she could feel her eyes start to water. "Oh. Um.. yes of course." ' _Stupid. Stupid me. That's not Danny. Danny is dead. ...He's dead.'_ Ashildr appeared at her side. "Clara?" Clara wiped at her eyes fiercely and stepped a little away from Ashildr and the image of her dead boyfriend.

"I am the Voice interface." He Repeated. "Which records would you like to access?TARDIS inhabitants, Trip records, previous maintenance-"

"Uh, we don't actually want the records. But maybe you could tell us a little more about the ship? And why is 'Danny' what you look like? Where did that come from." Ashildr took point so Clara could recover. She felt chilled even though she wasn't susceptible to temperature now that she was dead and all. Clara stood slightly behind Ashildr to shield herself from not-Danny.

"I am programmed to pick the form of a person of whoever sumon's me is comfortable with. Out of my infinite database this one best meets the criteria."

He replied.

"Well, change it! You are not Danny and so you have no right to use his form." Clara all but shouted at the interface. Ash glanced over her shoulder to Clara briefly. Danny changed into An image of The Doctor. He stood there with his crazy hair and attack eyebrows and Clara couldn't breath. (Not that she needed to- but if she did, she wouldn't be able to.) "No. Not _Him_ ether." _'This is my TARDIS, I don't need a doctor in this one too!'_

The interface changed to a projection of Clara's mother, Ellie. That she thought she could live with. After waiting a beat as if to see if Clara would protest to this form, the Interface continued. "What do you want to know?" Ellie asked Ashildr.

"Well for starters, I've been wondering, who does this TARDIS belong to? And can Gallifrey track us- do they know where we are?" As Ashildr performed a Q&A, Clara finally shook off her 'seen a ghost' feeling, and she felt like she could talk again.

"This unit belongs to Clara Oswald. Gallifrey has been blocked from Communications and therefore they cannot track our location." Clara let a small smile slip over her lips. The doctor's TARDIS hadn't liked her very much- but this was _her_ TARDIS. ' _And Ashildr's'_ her mind added fiercely.

Unaware of Clara's satisfaction in hearing the TARDIS state itself to be hers, Ash continued "Cut off Communications... who cut off communications?" "I did." Ellie replied. Clara's smile widened. ' _You're up for the long way round' too, huh?'_

A few hours later, Ashildr was still in the middle of her Q&A with the TARDIS. She had gotten her current journal and was taking notes all lots of topics. Clara had disappeared Into the depths of the TARDIS a while ago, and Ash hadn't seen her since.

Petting Oscar who was on her lap, Ash wrote everything Ellie said down. "Ok. I think I just have one more question." Ash glanced over her shoulder to make sure Clara still wasn't there. "What can you tell me about Clara's… condition? How long can she stay like that? Will there be serious side effects?" Ashildr was worried that having an immortal Clara was too good to be true. She bit her lip Anxiously.

"Clara Owslad has only one heartbeat left. She must be returned to her timeline as soon as possible." The interface explained coolly. Ash's heart sank. ' _Surely that's just what she's programmed to say. That can't be true- she's been fine! I saw her die… but goodness knows I came back from the dead! Why can't she have this? Why can't I have this?'_

She was still deep in thought when Clara came into the diner once again. Looking over her shoulder Ash saw that she was wearing the Sonic-Sunglasses the doctor had left. "Hey- are you done with your nerding? Can we go on an adventure now?" She strode over to where Ash sat at a Booth. "Yah, Alright."

Clara looked so laid back and happy. Ashildr didn't remember what that left like- she didn't even remember _remembering_ what it felt like. _We need the mayflys._ That was one of the things that she kept hearing in her head. She couldn't pick out a single other thing from her second adventure with the doctor, but she remembered that. It had made her so mad- why didn't she ever deserve to spend her life with someone? Looking at Clara she thought ' _I don't think you'd ever become like me. You'll always be a mayfly.'_ Even though it was her own thought, Ash couldn't decide if the idea made her happy or jealous.

"Great! So I'd thought we'd go to someplace really cold. I mean- I won't be able to tell if it is cold, but I like snow a lot… What'd you say?" She said excitedly. "Sounds good to me." She slipped out from under Oscar and carried him as she followed Clara to the control room.

"I don't know how The Doctor pilots his TARDIS alone, we barely manage it when we work together." Clara exclaimed as she started pulling levers and turning switches. Gallifreyen was one of the languages Ash hadn't been able to pick up over her long life, so the manual was mostly useless. She had been able out just enough through images and deduction to make the TARDIS a diner, but other than that she and Clara didn't know what they were doing.

Though Ash didn't remember having met Clara before, she supposed that they two of them had 'clicked,' because they could fly the TARDIS together mostly without problems, and it was know that timelord ships had an attitude. "Hold on." Ash said, putting Oscar down. Clara did just that, and the TARDIS went zooming off through the time vortex. The two women

-and the cat- were thrown about the control room before they landed with a shutter of the diner.

"This planet is called Ragous, The Doctor took me here once but we didn't stay for long." Clara was bouncing on her heels with excitement. "When I was here, there was a war between the two countries of this planet. But now, if I've got my timing right, the war is over and the planet is peaceful." ' _I've lived so long and yet there are so many places I've never heard of.'_ Ashildr thought to herself while Clara continued to tell tales of cybermen in the snow. "Well let's hurry up and go explore then, if you are so excited!" Ash cut Clara off. "Yes- right. Ok. But first, we need to get changed."

Not ten minutes later, the two immortals stepped out into the snow in big fuzzy coats and warm boots. Clara waved at Oscar who was meowing at them through the glass door of the diner. She locked the door and the TARDIS vanished. That part still unsettled Ashildr. She placed a tentative hand on the invisible ship and felt the diner wall under her fingers.

Turning back to her, Clara said "Ok. Oh, one more thing." Clara held out her fist to Ash. With a questioning look, She held out her palm to receive whatever it was Clara had in her hand. Clara placed her fist in Ash's hand, and spread out her fingers, lacing them with Ash's until she was holding her hand.

Ashildr stared at their clasped hands. She didn't know what to say or what to think or how she felt. She hadn't touched another person in… in long enough for her to not remember when she last had. Ashildr had closed herself off a billon lifetimes ago, and being alone was all she could ever remember. She had a husband and family when she was very young, and for a long time she had Jack, but she had forgotten everything about anyone she had ever loved. And yet there she stood, in the snow, on an alien planet outside her TARDIS with the hand of another immortal who treated her with so much affection in her own.

Clara's hand was warm despite it being so freezing cold outside- it must have been warm on Trap-street. She was wearing as much snow gear as Ash, even though she couldn't feel the biting cold -Both because neither of them new if the cold could affect her, and because anyone who saw her would take notice of in-proper clothing in this weather. With a giggle, Clara snapped Ash out of her bewilderment. Clara pulled Her along as she started to trudge through the snow. She followed a part of the ground that was less deep than the rest, presuming it to be a road.

They could see the scattered lights of civilization ahead when the reached the top of a nearby hill. They were walking stride for stride as the snow fell slowly around them. "Me?" Clara's small voice disturbed the quiet of the moment. -Ashildr very carefully _didn't_ wince. Even though it was her who insisted her companion call her by that name, she hated the way it sounded coming out of Clara's mouth. It just didn't feel right- like it wasn't _her_ who Clara was addressing. "Mhm?" She responded.

"You don't remember anything about what happened on Trap-street, do you." She said it like a question, but it was more of a statement. "I don't… but you know I know what happened." Clara didn't say anymore for a while, and Ash didn't press it.

Ashildr heard her own voice start to say something before she knew she'd decided to talk. "Clara..." She gathered her thoughts and continued. "You and the Doctor are the only people still alive who met me when I was mortal. I never forgot the two of you, even when I forgot what specifically we had said to one another or what had happened when we were together. I met you a second time, and you died by my power… and now we get this extra- this 'wiggle room,' and-" she didn't quite know how to say what she was feeling. "I guess I just wanted to say thanks. You are one of my only friends in the universe, and I've loved these past few days with you. Because you are my friend, and you knew me before I was who I am now, I think it would be ok… it would be _nice_ if you called me Ashildr." She said tentatively.

Clara rested her head on Ashildr's shoulder as they walked. "Ok." She said sweetly. "And, you are very welcome, Ashildr."


	3. CH 3: Ghost City

**Chapter 3 - Ghost City:**

The Two women reached the outskirts of the city, and passed by some strange warehouses and industrial facilities. Every now and then Clara would stop and pull on Ash's coat to point out an unfamiliar species of livestock, or a bird watching them from a tree. They'd probably walked an hour from the TARDIS when they came to the more suburban part of the city. All the lights seemed to be off even though it was daylight out.

They saw many different kinds of stores and buildings. Skyscrapers clothed in white snow loomed over them as they strode down the street.

Clara noticed it after having walked quite a way down the road. When she did, she also realized that Ashildr was already well aware of the oddity in this alien city. She pulled away from Ash to turn around. "Where is everyone?" She asked quietly. Ashildr didn't respond, she just looked around slowly and kept walking with her hands in her coat pockets.

Clara ran a few steps to catch up again and she looped her arm in her companion's. They kept on down the abandoned roads. Clara could feel Ash's growing unease as they went deeper into unknown territory. The shadows of a city aren't noticeable when there are streetlights and the chatter of people, but here, the shadows krept closer to the two immortals with every step they took.

Clara caught the sight of movement out of the corner of her eye and she opened her mouth to exclaim, but before she could make a noise she was face first in the snow. She felt stiffness in her body and her mind was clouded with an annoying haze that made it hard to think clearly. Scrambling to get up, she frantically looked for Ashildr who's arm wasn't in hers anymore. She saw her after a moment, fighting ferociously with a figure who was twice her size. She hadn't seen anyone come up to them or even felt herself fall.

Clara stood and started to run to her friend's aid. "Ashildr!" She shouted, distracting Her from her fight and costing her just a moment. One moment was all it took though, for her attacker to throw her to the ground and point his weapon at her face.

' _Dam. I'm sorry! Stupid stupid.'_ Clara was furious with herself for being so foolish as to risk Ash the fight. She stopped in her tracks running over to the two fighters when the alien caught sight of her. "Don't move!" He shouted at her. Ashildr didn't seem particularly concerned about being held at knifepoint in the snow, so Cool lara wasn't ether. She just looked bemused that Clara had distracted her. ' _Nice going, Clara.'_ That expression said _._ She could almost hear Ash's gently sarcastic voice in her head.

"You two!" The yellow, white, and furry man gestured at Ash on the ground, and then Clara. "You are coming with me." He

Yelled. _'Rude.'_ Clara thought with a twitch of anger. They hadn't done anything wrong! They were just walking down the street of an abandoned city on alien planet in the snow, like one does.

Grabbing Ash by the arm he pulled her to her feet. He held his long dagger to her throat and Clara glared at him. With his head he nodded for Clara to walk where he could see her. Because Ash seemed to have no objection, Clara obayed. ' _Maybe she has a plan, which is more than I can say at the moment.'_ Her head still ached. The man kept ahold of Ashildr and Clara wondered who he was, and why he wanted to take them hostage.

He took them into a nearby building and up a flight of stairs. As they walked, Clara slipped her hand into her coat pocket to make sure she still had the sonic sunglasses. She found them after a bit of digging, and she found some small confidence in touching them. A door opened and two more people of the same species as their captor met them. "I found these two humans wandering the streets!" Said the man still holding a knife to Ashildr's throat.

So they knew what a human was at least. With a sceptical look, one of the people, a woman, (by her hoop earrings and red lipstick) gestured for the man with Ash to come into the room. A moment later all five people (Clara, Ashildr, and the three unnamed aliens) were standing in a large living room. All the while the first man kept a tight hold on Ash. Clara was starting to get tired of that.

"Found them?" What were they doing?" Said the woman. Clara gathered her dignity around herself and took a deep breath. "We were walking. We were walking in the street, wondering where all the people were, when we were jumped." She started to pace around the room ignoring the fact that she was still technically a prisoner in their clutches. "Mind telling us what that's all about by the way? What did we do to end up in the snow?" She questioned Cooley.

"Well, you were people in the street." Said the man who'd attacked them. The other man hadn't said anything at all, and Clara could tell by his hunched shoulders and averted eyes that he was nervous about having humans near him. "And?" Clara put her hands on her hips angrily. She saw that one of the walls in this room was partially covered by a red-thread board. It showed many images and bits of text in foreign languages. ' _The TARDIS will translate it in a moment.'_ As if Ash had also heard that thought, she looked at the board too just then as Clara regarded it.

"Wava," said dagger-to-throat guy, "we haven't seen anyone for weeks and now there are two _humans_ in the city? How is that possible?" Clara wasn't quite following. No one in the city in weeks? What did he mean? "I still don't understand why being in a city is cause to be captured." Clara continued impatiently.

"You could be suspects of the population's sudden disappearance." The woman, _Wava,_ said.

"Oh! So that means we deserve to be thrown to the ground?" She was really starting to get ticked off, and having someone continue to hold a blade to Ashildr's neck wasn't helping. "I just-" Clara Cut him I off. "You just what? You thought it would be ok to kidnap two people who have done nothing wrong?" Wava tried to butt in with "Nolan was only because cautious."

"Cautious?" There was danger in her voice. "Yes we-" "Shut up." Clara spat. "You have nothing more to say to me right now." She looked around at the three of them with a powerful distaste. "We came here, you hid from us." She held up a finger. "Then you attacked us for simply walking in the streets." A second finger. "You brought us here without telling us anything, and to top it all off, you are _still_ trying to threaten me through her." With four fingers raised, she pointed at Ash. "You laid ONE hostile finger on her. No one touches Ashildr." Clara spoke slowly and loudly like she was addressing a very old person. "No, none of you have anything to say to me."

She took in another breath. All three aliens were frozen with blank looks of their faces. Clara looked at her companion. "That being said," she said quieter, "Ash, your fine. Come and help me with this." Clara was very curious about the thread board. Ashildr stuck out her tongue and tilted her head in mock rebellion. "Oh don't give me that!" Clara laughed and crossed her arms. She nodded at the clock behind Ashildr's head. "I'll time you. Forty seconds?" Ash scoffed. "Thirty!" Her eyes shone, and the claws that had been clutching Clara's stomach from the moment Ashildr had been pushed to the snow made themselves known by going away. "Ok." She said with a smile.

Ashildr stepped over Nolan's unconscious body and looked at the still unnamed Alien. "They'll be fine, just out for a few minutes." He was staring at her with terror in his eyes. Ashildr ignored him and walked with Nolan's dagger to Clara's side. She tapped her shoulder. "Thirty?" She asked eagerly. Clara turned to face her and glanced at the clock. "Thirty-seven." Ashildr frowned. "Eh, close enough." She held her hand up for a high five, and before she knew what she was doing, Clara hit her hand. Ash wondered when that little bit of earth culture had come back to her.

Clara looked at Ashildr's arm. She grabbed her hand and pulled her until Ash stumbled a few steps closer. Clara examined a Cut on Ashildr's forearm that she hadn't even noticed. It was long, but it wasn't deep. The dagger must have gone all the way through her winter coat. "It's just a Cut Clara." "Hm." She reluctantly released her, and Ash covered the cut with her hand "Look at this! It seems to say that all the people who live in this city suddenly disappeared in a day. Isn't that crazy?" Clara's attention switched back to Ye thread board easily.

"Yeah, it is. How did that happen?" She wondered aloud. "W-we don't know. When we got here everyone was just gone." Said the timid voice the only Alien left awake. (He hasn't tried to stop Ashildr from getting away from Nolan.) "When was this?" Clara looked at him cautiously. "Six days ago. I'm Fin by the way." "I'm Clara, and this is Ashildr." She nodded to Ash. "We came here just to look around, and we saw that no one was here. What about you?"

"My brother, and my sister, and I" he glanced at the other people lying on the floor. "were coming here to visit our aunt. We know they disappeared within a day because I called her the morning of the day we arrived and nothing was wrong. This is her house." Fin looked around sadly. Ashildr Wondered what they should do next, but before she could start thinking about making a plan Clara started. "Ash, can you get on that computer and find out what the exact population of this city is?" She passed her the Sonic glasses.

She smiled to herself as she took the sunglasses and started working at the computer. She liked that Clara had decided to appoint Ashildr a nickname- hearing Clara call her 'Ashildr' was enough, but that she had term of affection for her was even better. "Fin, is there anything else you know?" Ashildr tuned them out.

It took about five minutes for Ashildr to figure out what was going on. Zapping the computer with the Sonic let her access anything she cared to, and with her genius knowledge of technology, she was unstoppable at a keyboard. She loved the hunt of searching through information at a mile a minute to find a little bit to give her a lead, or figuring out a puzzle of clues from a dangerous situation.

"Ok-" she cut into whatever the two were discussing. "Two options. Ether there was some kind of virus outbreak that killed off all 400,000 people, leaving no bodies, or they have all been teleported off-world." "What makes you say that?" Fin asked as she stood up again. "From the sudden lack of the many, many, forms communication around this city, we can establish that there was a crisis that took everyone's attention. There is no evidence of leaving by foot or car or whatever, and evacuating a whole city couldn't be done in a day anyway." Clara made a smug expression.

' _Pretty impressive, right?'_ Ashildr said to Clara. She smirked as she saw the astonishment on Clara's face. It had taken Ash the whole walk from the TARDIS to figure out what Ellie had told her about telepathy. She'd said that TARDIS inhabitants are able to speak mind-to-mind if they know how to do it. Something about the translation matrix let even humans share thoughts. Based on the fact that Clara hadn't talked about it before, and how surprised she was that Ash was using it now, Ashildr guessed that Clara hadn't used the thought communication in The Doctor's TARDIS.

Clara opened her mouth to talk but Fin cut her off before she said anything. "Ok, so which one then?" He seemed very nervous at the prospect of the whole city dead by a plague. "I… can't tell. It really could be either." Clara snapped back into saving-a-city-of-people mode and said "Look at this- Wava and Nolan found these around the city," Clara took a picture off the wall and handed it to Ash. The photo was of a six-ish foot tall silver cylinder. "Fin says they walked the perimeter of the city and there are five around the outside- like markers maybe?" Clara said. "Hm…" Ashildr examined the picture. "We need to go see them and that way we can scan them." She looked at Clara and then Fin.

"What about Wava and Nolan?" Fin was still worried about them. Ashildr felt a little guilty for hurting them now she'd talked to Fin. "We can go. you can stay here if you want- to watch them. We'd be back quickly." Clara piped in. Ash nodded.

Fin was ok with that plan, so Clara and Ashildr set out armed with the Sonic Sunglasses and a map to where Wava had found the cylinders. "Something we don't know anything about! That's rule number eight. ALWAYS, when you see something you don't know anything about, go and poke it with a stick!" Clara's eyes shimmered with a challenge.


	4. CH 4: Captured by the Bird Prince

**_Heyo! This chapter is a little late so I made it a bit longer. BTW, if anyone has a suggestion that i would be able to work into this story, go ahead and let me know! Hope you enjoy this leg of the adventure._**

 ** _-Skwick_**

* * *

 **Chapter 4 - Captured by the Bird Prince:**

Clara walked very quickly and Ash could tell she was excited. "You are very happy to have 400,000 people missing." Clara looked a little embarrassed. "Yah, well… how often do cities disappear?" She asked with a chuckle.

When Ashildr didn't seem impressed, Clara changed the subject. "Has your arm healed yet? How quickly does the Mire chip heal wounds like that?" Ash examined the slice in her jacket. "Pretty quickly, it's healed now. This poor coat didn't fare so well though." Clara slowed to look at Ashildr's perfectly healed skin. "Woah. That _was_ fast!" Ash nodded.

They walked a little longer before Clara said "Do you think Fin will be alright?" She seemed a little worried. "Yes, he'll be ok. And so will his brother and sister." _'If you hadn't condemned them to my rath, then maybe they'd be a little better, but…'_ She teased. Clara spun around, so she was standing right in front of Ashildr. "So I hadn't imagined it! You really were talking in my head!" She exclaimed with bewilderment. "Took you long enough." Remarked Ash. "How?! Where did you learn that? How long have you been able to do it? Why didn't you tell me?" Clara bounced on her heels.

"It's not an Ashildr-the-immortal thing, it's a TARDIS thing. The TARDIS told me about it when I was performing my Q&A. TARDIS inhabitants can use the telepathic translation matrix to communicate mind-to-mind. I didn't tell you because I wanted to figure it out first. It's kinda tricky- I think only about a third of what I've been trying to tell you is has actually gotten through." Ashildr's eyes wandered all over the abandoned city around them as she explained. "That's brilliant! I wonder if the Doctor's TARDIS could do that." Ash shrugged. "He probably didn't know how to use it." Clara added with a giggle

"We should keep going or we won't get back quickly and Fin will most certainly have a panic attack." Clara shot Ashildr a mock glare for that comment. _'She makes it seem like he's TRYING to be a scared, useless lump.'_ Ash heard Clara's voice drift in and out of her head. "I heard that." She said. "You did? Huh. We are going to have to practice this."

"Whatever you say." Ash started to walk again and Clara followed suit. She took her hand once again and Ashildr felt the now almost familiar warmth in her cheeks. Luckily Clara wasn't looking at her. She decided she would definitely be practicing the telepathic connection- she didn't want any of her thoughts to be shared with Clara accidentally. (Especially since she couldn't sort out her feelings herself, she didn't want Clara rummaging through them.)

They seemed to make better time out of the city than they had on their way in. Clara was in charge of the map, and she had also put the Sonic sunglasses on. "Oh my goodness you can't wear those in this snow! You look bonkers!" Ashildr laughed. Clara just made a face. "Who is here to see?" She teased, holding her chin up determinately.

The closest of the objects to Fin's Aunt's house was on top of a great hill that shielded the city. It took the two about an hour and a half before they were standing next to it. "It just looks like a great big pillar." Clara rounded it, scanning with the glasses. "The Sonics say it's a teleport transmitter." She reported "Ha! I was right then. The people were teleported out." Ashildr said as she ran her hands over the metal looking for an access hatch. She found a seam in the surface after a moment and she reached her hand out to Clara. She handed the Glasses over, and Ash opened the control hatch.

There were a lot of wires and little flashing lights. "Poke it with a stick, huh?" Ashildr teased. Clara seemed to be unsure even after all her talk of messing with the Cylinders. "Why would someone want to kidnap and entire city?" She wondered aloud. "Slavery… experiments… once I heard about something like this happening, where pirates would remove the population of a town to raid it for money or whatever, and then put all the people back. But, I find it highly unlikely that someone would be able to do that to a whole city without catching the eye of some external party." Ashildr examined the wires while she talked. "Ash." Clara sounded like Ashildr was missing something obvious, so she looked up.

"Clara and Ashildr- time travelers of the universe- _We are_ an 'external party.'" She smiled.

* * *

Clara could've worn that the teleport pod was angry at them for prodding around inside it. It loomed over them as they kneeled to peer in the access panel. She held back a wire for Ash who was Zapping it with the glasses. "What are you trying to find out now?" She asked. "Anything useful." Ashildr passed Clara another wire to keep out of her way. "How far the teleport range can reach might tell us where everyone is. I might even be able to recognize some symbol from a company r species or-"

with a little spark, the two women were thrown away from the cylinder. _'What's with being thrown in the snow today?!'_ Clara thought hotly. But when she opened her eyes she had to blink quickly because it was suddenly dark. And there was _no snow-_ only hard metal under her.

"Clara?" She heard Ashildr whisper. "Yeah- yeah, I'm here. What happened? Where are you?" She sat up, and as her eyes adjusted, she saw that she was in a small room that had one wall of bars. "I'm here." Ashildr put her hand on Clara's shoulder and Clara turned to see her. "I think we were teleported. To where, I don't know."

They stood up, and Clara walked to the Bars. There was a thin layer of straw on the cold floor. "Is this a cell?" She asked, looking down the hallway to see many other rooms with Bars. "Must be." In all the other cells there were people that appeared to be the same species as Fin and his siblings. Some rooms had as many as a dozen people in them. Clara continued to whisper, following Ash's lead of not drawing the attention to themselves. "Ok… So we found the people."

"Yes. Time for a plan. We need to get everyone out of here, and find out who took everyone. Then, we need to make sure they don't do it again." Ashildr sounded cross. "Alright… well, first things first. Let's get _us_ out of this cell." Clara said matter-of-factly.

Ashildr grabbed the Sonic Sunglasses off the cell floor. ' _We are really lucky that they teleported with us'_ Clara thought. Ash nodded, and Clara realized she had shared that with her. Once they were out of the cell, clara could see that the hallway was a lot longer than she had seen before, with lots of twists and turns to make the most room possible for cells.

"Where to?" Ashildr asked mockingly. Clara glared before taking her question seriously. "How about a window? We need to know where we are." They walked for a long time down the hallways. Some people in the jail cells noticed them but no one seemed to care that they were there.

Clara noted that Ashildr was casually kicking pieces of straw to make a visibly clear spot on the floor every time they turned a corner. If they turned left, she'd mark the left side of the hallway before the corner, if they went right, she'd mark the right. Clara wondered if Ash even knew she was doing it. It seemed almost like the kind of thing she just _did_ without any planning or conscious decision making. That Ash had lived long enough to pick up so many bazaar (yet immensely useful) tricks that worked like second nature to her still asstounded Clara.

It didn't matter that someone had kidnapped an entire city, or that Clara and Ashildr needed to save everyone and escape- Clara could feel the odd state between being a little scared, and being really bored, creep over her. "Well this isn't getting any more interesting. What do you do if the bad guy doesn't show up promptly?" She whispered teasingly. "Seriously? You are complaining about waiting?" Clara winced. ' _Fair enough, I guess compared to Ash I have no room to talk.'_ Clara considered, careful to not pass on her thoughts.

"You are right though. What's the point of being heros when we haven't got anyone to fight?" Ashildr added. Almost as a response to their annoyance, as soon as She finished talking, a loud siren blared. Clara decided that they should have quit whispering, and yelled to get some attention a long time ago. White lights flashed and Clara heard military style footsteps surrounding them over the noise. "Finally!" Clara exclaimed. ' _Clara, we aren't supposed to want to be arrested.'_ Ashildr scolded.

"Intruders! Halt!" Shouted a voice behind a bright flashlight. Clara wanted to laugh out loud. She didn't think she'd ever be able to take the word _intruder_ seriously again after Oscar's entrance to their life. "Can you please stop shining that light in our faces?" Ashildr asked angrily. The person with the flashlight did as she asked and in a moment the flashing lights and blaring noise stopped too. Because the older immortal's attention was on the enemy, Clara could take a brief moment see that all the commotion was really scaring everyone in the cells all around them.

"You are coming with us." Said the guard. He looked like a purple humanoid bird with great big orange feathers on his head. Him and all of his buddies wore classic prison guard attire complete with visors and very threatening blaster guns. "Yes! _Take us to your leader."_ Ashildr seemed very unimpressed with all the dramatic weapons and marching.

They were escorted out a door in the wall that only appeared with a scan of the lead guard's badge. Clara and Ashildr had had no chance of finding a way out on their own after all it seemed. When they exited the prison area they were able to see through large windows that they were on a space station or ship of some kind.

' _I bet we are orbiting Fin's planet. What did you call it? Ragous?'_ Ashildr's voice slid into Clara's thoughts like silk. It took her a moment to focus on what was happening again- the whole mind-to-mind thing was very different from normal communication. Tone and emphasis of words were portrayed as emotions when they shared thoughts. _'...Yes, Ragous. I guess Fin and his siblings are down there still?'_ Clara was worried about Fin because he had been so scared with his siblings unconscious. Then she remembered _why_ they were unconscious, and she stop carrying so much. Ash didn't reply to her half-question.

There were maybe a dozen bird-people guards around them. The lead guy was recognizable by his dark blue uniform. All the others had a pale yellow one. After turning a few corners they stopped outside a huge door. "Enter. The Prince will determine your fate. Trespassers are taken very seriously." He instructed bluntly. Clara could see the stiffness in Ashildr's shoulders that meant she was annoyed, and wondered if Ash had more knowledge about what was going on than Clara did. Through the door was a big room bedecked in shiny metals and royal blue and indigo colour patterns. The two women left the guards at the entrance, walking side by side up to the massive throne in the centre of the chamber.

Atop the decorated seat was a miniature version of the bird people guards (except he was wearing a golden robe and crown.) the whole display reminded Clara a lot of Emperor Porridge's ship. She smiled a little at the memory of that adventure with bowtie Doctor.

"Why were you two humans trespassing on my vessel? How did you get into the prison sector? That area is under strict surveillance." Demanded the boy. That's when it hit Clara that the two immortals had been being accused of the wrong thing. They hadn't broken in, they had been teleported there. If this 'prince' was asking how they got there that must mean that he didn't bring them there. ' _We'd been fiddling with the teleporter. Apparently we set it off and we were brought where is was programmed to bring us- here. If they didn't realize that two more people had been sorted into a cell in their prison, they must not be very on top of things. This'll be easy.'_ Ashildr sounded smug in Clara's head, but her expression stayed completely somber.

"Strict surveillance, hm? We, two humans, boarded your ship and broke into the prison ward in ten minutes flat." Ash's voice was cool and disinterested, making sure the alien understood he was not high in her priorities. The prince looked like Clara's students did when they were held in from recess on bad behaviour. "What do you want? Why have you come here?" Demanded the boy. "No, you don't get to ask questions. That's not how this works. You either threaten us, proving you really do hold a place of power, or you let me ask the questions and we can cut to the chance. You haven't chosen to threaten us, so my first question is why did you abduct an entire city of people?"

Clara stayed quite, leaning back on her heels as Ash paced in front of the throne. "I could have you two just thrown in jail for trespassing on my ship." He sounded like he was trying to hide the fear that Ashildr was right- he should have threatened them. "Yes, you could. But then this would just take longer. What do you want with 400,000 people?" She didn't look back at Clara at all as she talked, which Clara took to mean she didn't need any help with this child ruler.

He sighed, leaned back in his throne, and pressed his finger-like feathers together in thought. After a moment he confided in them. "My advisors said to capture the population cleanly and efficiently. Having all suspects in custody makes locating the offender seamless." He smirked, seemingly proud of his actions. "You are saying that you kidnapped an entire city just to find someone hiding in it?" Clara stepped forward to interrupt. ' _That's horrible! Those are innocent people!'_ She thought about all the children she'd seen in the cells.

Ashildr glanced at her with a hint of sympathy in her eyes. "I don't answer to you lowly _humans._ I am Prince Drosh, the third of my name. I will do what I please in order to capture one who has committed a crime." His sour words made Clara's mind drift to Trap street. His words were so very similar to what Ashildr had said about Rigsy. Clara could feel shivers at the back of her neck where a alien tattoo told her her time was up, and she took a deep breath to steady her racing mind. Ash turned to her ever so slightly. It was just the angle of her shoulders and the placement of her foot that told Clara she was thinking the same thing. If it was Clara's thoughts that had prompted Ashildr to make that connection as well, or if she did it on her own, Clara did not know.

"What crime is so horrible that an entire civilization must suffer in order for justice to be served?" Ash questioned suspiciously. She must been thinking what Clara was thinking- if someone would make such an outrageous ordeal of finding a criminal, they must have either done something really bad, or there is something fishy going on with the catcher. "That's None of your business." Retorted the prince. _'Ash, we need to get those people back to their home.'_ Clara thought, hoping Ashildr would catch it.

"It is, actually. It's our business if you are causing unnecessary harm to a whole city's population. Now put everyone in your prison back on that planet." Said Ashildr with her authoritative voice she used when earning her title as Lady. "Why should I?" He eyed her, standing to walk down the steps to them. Clara decided this was going to end poorly. Either Ashildr would make it violent, or the prince would make it dangerous. Neither of which would be useful.

Ash started "Because if you don't-" Clara cut her off smoothly. "Because if you don't, many people will continue to be held captive for no reason. Isn't there a better way to perform your investigation?" She put a hand on Ash's shoulder, asking her to let her take over. The prince opened his beak to continue, but the noise of the door opening stopped him. On of the guards came in and strode past the two women to whisper in his ear. When he was done he stood behind the prince, glaring at the two immortals.

"Does the TARDIS on the planet below belong to you?" Asked Drosh. Clara felt her heart sink. ' _Darn.'_ "Yes it is." Ash said slowly. "Our scanners picked up a building on the surface and I had it identified." The guard passed him a small remote-looking device when the prince held out his hand for it. Clara saw Ashildr tense out of the corner of her eye. Apparently _she_ knew what that was.

"With the press of a button, I can have your ship teleported to the station. You will have no way of escape and I will have the most powerful kind of spacecraft out there." ' _How does he even know what it is?'_ Ash asked. Clara didn't know. "Trespassers can be sentenced to incarceration, you won't be getting away so easily." He added smugly. Clara couldn't believe that a boy whose voice sounded like he could be the same age as Clara's students was standing before them, wearing a crown, and using words like 'incarceration.'

Ash glanced at Clara quickly. She gave her a look of worry and urgency. ' _Fine. Fine, ok.'_ Clara gave in. She turned back to the bird-people. "You can't just kidnap a city and hope to get away with it." Ashildr said before she stepped forward and grabbed the remote from the boy's hand, dodging the swipe the guard made for her. She tossed it behind her and Clara caught it. Clara threw it to the ground and stamped on it with her snow boot, cracking it loudly. They both stepped away from the guard as he radioed for backup. The prince looked furious- standing there with tight fists and a clenched jaw. All the guards Clara had hoped they'd ditched outside came storming in. Before she could think, Ash grabbed her hand and they were running out a door behind the throne.

They were extremely lucky that the door lead back out into the hallways they'd walked to get there. As soon as they were out of the prince's sight the now familiar sirens and lights began to roar. The two had a little bit of a lead, and a lot of motivation, so they got ahead of their pursuers. They ran down random Corridors and staircases until They found what looked like a cupboard to hide in. The two women jumped in, closed the door quietly, and crouched against the door under the window. Between quick breaths Ash managed "I-If, they H-Have, a scanner, for th-the Planet, I'm sure, they'll be able, to find us on their o-own ship."

Clara nodded. They had to get out of there fast. She looked around the small room they were in to see it wasn't a closet after all. It was more like a service room for some of the ship's tech. Ash stood and peered out the window. "There aren't there, but we still need to figure a way out of this quickly." Clara knew she was right. She looked around for something useful like a control panel FULL of big friendly buttons. All she found was a blueprint map of the ship- that would do.

"Look at this." She said to Ash after a minute of looking it over. "There is a room called Teleport Mainway." She reported, pointing on the map. "Mainway? What does that mean?" Asked Ash. "Not sure… but I bet that if we can get there, we can figure out how to put everyone back!" She said excitedly.

Loud footsteps sounded outside the room and they both froze. Clara didn't know what to do- had the guards found them already? The two women stepping cautiously towards the door to listen. Ash held her breath, and Clara just didn't breath. She opened her mouth to speak, but the someone turned the handle from the other side of the door. Thinking quickly, Clara shoved Ash over into the wall. As soon as she was able to give Clara a 'What the hell?' Look, the door slammed open.

Ash was hidden from the guard that burst in because she was pressed against the wall the door was in, and Clara stepped forward to meet the bird-person as soon as he saw her. ' _Get to the control room for the teleport. Get everyone back into the city. I'll be ok._ ' She said without speaking or looking to her hidden companion. "I found one!" Shouted the man, grabbing her by the arm.

As he dragged her away, Clara wished that Ash would be able to save everyone before they caught her too. So many people in the prison needed to get home. If saving them meant being held captive by a boy-ruler, she could do that. ' _Get everyone out, Ash, please.'_ While she was being marched down to hallway she hoped fiercely that Ashildr had gotten her message.


	5. CH 5: Handsome Stranger

_**Another late one! I have an idea to make a half chapter so that I can help the plot along without it being too complicated. Anyway, I really like this chapter so i hope you enjoy.**_

 _ **-Skwick**_

* * *

 **Chapter 5 - Handsome stranger:**

This was a bad idea. This was really, properly, a terrible plan. ' _But it's our best shot.'_ Ashildr told herself as she creeped down the halls of the space station. It didn't take _her many years_ of living for someone to understand that splitting up the heroes in an adventure story never ends well. Thoughts of dumb teenagers breaking off from the group in horror movies drifted around in her head.

Ashildr walked extremely quietly and carefully. She tried desperately to stay focused on her task- she had to get to the control room and reverse the recent teleportations, putting everyone who had been abducted from their city back home. But as she followed turns on her map Ash was unable to stop worrying. She knew that the prince (who owned this ship and had ordered the abductions) would not be kind to Clara when she was brought before him a second time.

Worry wasn't something Ash really understood… she hadn't felt it for a long time before these past few adventures with Clara. To her, worry wasn't like anger or excitement, where she could control her actions when feeling them. It was like a deep sadness where she was unable to track down the source and cut it out of her system like she could for other feelings. She needed to keep her mind rational. Clara would be alright. She'd given Ashildr a task that made sense and was easy- Ash could do it without bursting with mushy feelings.

She heard footsteps and quickly turned a corner. Holding her breath and clenching her fists, she stayed stalk still- ready to defend herself if they caught up to her.

Ash waited until they passed by before she kept walking, rerouting her way to the teleport room around them with the map.

It was hard to tell exactly how long it would take her to get where she was going-there were no dimensions on the blueprint and the ship seemed to be huge. She hid from pursuing guards a few times before she finally found herself back outside the prison. Ashildr knew that when she went in, she wouldn't be able to get back out without a badge from one of the ship's crew. She'd be stuck and that meant she'd be unable to fetch Clara to get them out of there. She held her hand up to the door seal button and her fingers lingered in the air above it, undecided.

' _I doubt Clara can be teleported back to the plant from wherever on the ship she is… I'd guess that we have to be in the prison- where those teleported were sorted to in the first place.'_ Ash ran over the problem in her head. Was getting all those people back home a little sooner worth leaving Clara alone on an alien ship? She knew that Clara would want her to get all the people back, _'but…'_ the bird prince was dangerous. _'Clara wouldn't even want me to hesitate. I have to trust her and get these people home.'_

Ash pushed the button, the door slid open, and she ran inside. She has waisted valuable time deciding to come in. The entrance sealed behind her. Her eyes had to adjust to the dim light. The low ceilings, metal bars, and floors scattered with straw made the whole area seem like a scene from a movie.

Someone in one of the prison cells around her spoke softly to a crying baby. Two children who were whispering to each other noticed Ashildr and called out "Hey! Hey lady!" Ash looked up and down the hallways to make sure none of the bird-people guards were around her before she went closer to them. "Hello." She said quietly.

"Why don't you look like any of the rest of the Winfolk?" Asked the taller one. The other people in their cell, as well as a few from others, were visibly listening in. "...Who? Are the Winfolk the Bird-person guards?" The little boy nodded. "I'm not one of them- I don't belong here just like you. I got out." She raised her voice to everyone who might be listening. "I'm _trying_ to get all of you out too." That got a lot of attention. Hundreds of eyes watched her warily and Ashildr felt like all their focus on her would somehow lead the guards straight to her.

The little boy opened his mouth but Ash held her finger up to her lips as a gesture to keep quiet. She had to get to the control room quickly. She looked around slowly at everyone with an apologetic smile and then hurried on. A few turns later, Ashildr found the door labeled Teleport Mainway.

Luckily the room was both unlocked, and empty. In the room she found exactly what she expected to find. A whole control panel of switches, dials, and keys. There was also a larger monitor on that took up basically the whole left side of the room. She went up to the screened at used the sunglasses to turn it on.

' _Ash!'_ Thinking she'd heard Clara's voice, Ashildr whirled around. _'Ash- they know where you are- they are coming for you. You don't have a lot of time left you must get the teleport working.'_ She realized it was telepathic connection, not actually Clara's voice. Ash had to stop herself from explaining to Clara that she couldn't turn on the teleport because that would mean she'd leave Clara behind. It would waste time to argue about whether or not she should leave her.

' _I'm working on it.'_ She focused on sending the message to Clara so she'd know not to worry too much. When she got no further conversation, Ashildr got to work. The screen showed a map of the prison in all of its huge, twisty-turny, glory. When she selected a cell she could see a whole bunch of information about how the inhabitants got there, and even case files on each person in the prison. ' _Through job to find that criminal.'_ She thought to herself.

Ashildr was a computer genius. Actually, she was a proper genius in very close to everything in the universe. It did not take her long to decode the complex network of firewalls and passwords behind the station's teleport system. She had it set up the way she wanted in less than five minutes. She programmed it so that when she activated the teleport, everyone in the cells would be put back to their original location.

With some looking she found the unit she and Clara were sorted into. She saw that it had a warning explaining that not all inhabitants were present, and thus the pending teleport wouldn't be fully completed. If Ashildr wanted to be put back on the planet she'd have to be in the cell.

' _I can't leave her. I won't.'_ She thought fiercely. Not only did Clara have to stay unharmed for the sake of the universe, but to Ash, the thought of her being alone with the enemy for one moment longer than necessary was unacceptable. As she tried to figure out how to get Clara safely to her, Ash's hand found her TARDIS key on it's chain around her neck. The TARDIS! ' _Of course!'_ She could get them out of any predicament if she was at the TARDIS. She made up her mind. Ash would go back to the city with all the people, get to the Diner, and come back here to save Clara from the clutches of the prince.

Clicking them into the control board, she calibrated the controls to the Sonic. That way she'd be able to activate the teleport when she was in her cell. Ash heard the now familiar running steps of the prince's soldiers, and she muttered something rude under her breath. Clara had said they knew where she was. Probably some kind of lifeform tracking- which meant there was no point of hiding in the room. She would have to run past them. Normally, the running was one of the best bits of 'TARDIS adventures' (as Clara said.) But running was only fun if you were holding someone's hand so they were running with you.

She snached up the Sunglasses and quickly zapped the screen. Surprisingly, that did what she'd wanted it to- a few sparks flew and the whole system shut down. ' _Hopefully, now they can't cancel the Sonic's command when I active it.'_ And then she was out the door sprinting down the hallway. She'd made a mental map of where her cell was.

"'She's here!" Shouted some voice. She didn't even slow down- Ash kept running and running. She decided that from now on she would put her hair up (or at least bring a hair tie) when they went on trips in the TARDIS- because she had a hard time seeing where she was going with her hair obstructing her view. The guards appeared around a corner and soon gained on her. (Bird-people turned out to be fast.)

When she saw her cell door hanging open she felt relief rush over her. In a few more strides she reached it, and slammed the bar door behind her. She locked it with the sonics and stepped back from it. While all the dumb guards were fumbling and arguing over keys, Ash sent a quick explanation to Clara. _'Everyone is alright. I will get the TARDIS and come find you as soon as I can.'_

Ashildr had the oddest feeling that her message didn't get to Clara- like somehow someone was interfering with their telepathic connection. But she didn't have time to worry about it. She pressed the sunglasses and was gone sooner than she could take a deep breath.

* * *

Clara had been listening to the prince talk angrily at her for what felt like hours. Like she hadn't even gotten away in the first place, she was right back in the palace room. The only difference was that this time they had tied her hands."If you tell me where she is, this will go a lot better for you." Demanded the boy. He paced in front of his throne with guards behind him. "I'm not telling you where she is. Like I told you, I don't know." Clara had prided herself on being an excellent liar up until one day when a zygon named Bonnie had infiltrated her mind. She'd stopped bragging about it, but It was still useful sometimes.

The prince's expression was enraged."I don't know where she is- but even if I did, why would I ever tell you?" Continued Clara.

Her mind dragged her to the day she lost Danny. _You think I would give up the doctor? Don't be daft. I would never, ever, give up the doctor._ Clara remembered the fresh grief that had laced those words. Losing Danny had broken her in half and she was still not the same. She had vowed to never let herself be the same in a world where he wasn't. It felt like being happy without him wasn't ok. When he had been killed, The Doctor was who she lived for. He was her best friend. She'd needed something else to be, and he had helped her become that.

Together they had been toxic, though. _The hybrid._ Ashildr had been right, (as per usual,) Clara and the Doctor couldn't stay together any longer, and so she had left him behind. She'd thought she was owed something when Danny died. She'd thought she was owed him _back_. But no one is owed anything- she'd learned that that's not how the universe worked. The universe didn't give her Danny back. Instead, it had given her this. This 'wiggle room.' And now it was Ashildr who gave her something else to be.

One of the guards was typing away at a touchscreen on the side of the room. Her feather fingers made the only sound in the room (between conversation)- clicking noises. After a moment she said "Your grace, I think we have located the target." Prince Drosh strode up to peer at the screen. "The other woman?" He asked.

"No, Sir, I mean the criminal. We are still having trouble with the lifeform scanner, but we will locate her soon too." She pointed to something on the screen that Clara didn't understand, and Drosh smirked. "Good, well, have him brought here. I want him out of the prison sector immediately- in case the brat tries to tamper there too." He whispered that last part but Clara still caught it. She guessed that the 'brat' was Ashildr. Clara suppressed a giggle because though there were many, many, words one could use to describe her companion, 'brat' would never have come to her mind.

After speaking to the guard the prince came back over to shout at her some more. Clara mostly tuned him out because he didn't even ask her anything, he just ranted. A few minutes later a man was brought into the room. He wasn't one of Fin's species, which was odd because they had been looking for him amongst a city of Fin's people. This man looked pretty human to her, though she'd learned that what someone looked like didn't ever seem to be what they really were. He was tall, and he was what a lot of people would call handsome. His hands were bound behind his back just like clara's were.

His blue eyes were almost completely hidden by his dark, shaggy hair, but he still managed to make Clara feel like he was looking right through her. He looked at her the way a man might do when he wanted someone to use the word 'mysterious.' "It took us a long time to find you, Bram." Said the prince slyly. "I know _that."_ Responded 'Bram.' "What I don't know is why you're entire force has been following me across the universe! I told you, I. Didn't. Kill. Her." Clara didn't know what they were talking about, but it didn't mean she didn't listen in. Even his voice was attractive- he spoke very calmly to the prince like someone trying very hard to teach someone something very complicated.

"Sir!" Shouted the woman from before. "Tech fixed the tracker. The Human is in the teleport Mainway." They'd found Ash, but at least she was already at the control room. The prince ordered his guards to go and capture Ashildr. Maybe she'd be able to free the citizens in time. She tried to warn her. ' _Ash! Ash- they know where you are- they are coming for you. You don't have a lot of time left you must get the teleport working.'_ Clara tried hard to listen for a response, but nothing came through for a moment. Then ' _I'm working on it.'_ Clara let out the breath she hadn't known she'd been holding.

"Now I have all three of the people I was looking for." Said Drosh. He'd walked up to Bram and stood very close to him, glaring up at him. "Are you going to introduce us? Maybe we could start a band! I'd call it 'people Drosh has a problem with!' What'd ya think?" With the last part he elbowed Clara casually. "Or, what about 'wrongfully held hostage?' It's got quite the ring to it." She added with a chuckle.

Though watching the prince squirm was reason enough, Clara was mostly participating in the banter to buy Ash more time. She also really wanted to know more about the dispute between Bram and Drosh. "Bram, is it? I'm Clara." She was about to hold out her hand but the she remembered the handcuffs. He turned to her to respond, putting his shoulder between them and Drosh nonchalantly. "Yes it is. Nice to meet you, Clara. What sins have you committed to have this boy-of-a-ruler after you?" He spoke very smoothly, like someone who was used to chatting up strangers.

"We, I mean my friend and I, came to Ragous just to look around, and what do you know, everyone disappeared. Then we accidentally teleported ourselves to this ship, and prince grumpy has been trying to keep us caught ever since." As Clara spoke he nodded. She told the story quickly because she was eager to hear his. The prince cut in before he could speak, though. "Guards, have these two separated."

One of the guards grabbed Bram's shoulder and dragged him away from Clara. "Bram Douglas, you are under arrest for the murder of the princess Kitla." Said the armed bird-person in a monotone voice.

Just as someone touched her shoulder as well, the entire space station shook violently. Everyone had trouble keeping their balance, but because Clara's hands were tied she wasn't able to stay standing at all. She recovered from being thrown to the floor, and saw the fear that was on the face of every single other person in the room.

"What was that?!" She demanded. It was Bram that replied. "That was the teleport systems being fried…." when he trailed off one of the people at a touchscreen continued. "Every single person from Ragous has been put back! That's what rocked the ship." She sounded dumbstruck.

Ashildr had done it! Everyone was back on the planet. "What is our status?!" Shouted Drosh. "Sir, we need to return to the mother-ship to fix the damaged tech." Responded the woman very quietly. After a pause he replied. "Fine. We have Bram at least. We can return back now." He turned away to walk the steps to his throne. "What do you want with the girl?" Said the guard behind her. "Oh, I don't care. Kill her." Though the idea of someone trying to murder her was not very appealing, Clara couldn't help but think ' _Good luck trying. I beat you to it.'_

Apparently Bram wasn't as mellow about the idea. "You can't! Clara didn't do anything other than visit a planet." As he continued to defend her, Clara sensed the familiar, very subtle, rumble of the ground. She couldn't help but smile. Then came the wheezing noise that she loved with all of her heart. Everyone turned, and she saw her beautiful retro diner materializing in the corner of the prince's throne room.

When it was really there, Ashildr opened the door and strode past Clara, Bram, and the Guards, all the way up the steps and stood right in front of Drosh's throne. No one stopped her because everyone was shocked by the TARDIS. "Hi again. I was just on the planet below. I spoke with the mayor, who sent me to the Judoon. They told me that this isn't the first time you kidnapped a city to find your suspect. They also said that your father, who is _king_ , is looking everywhere for his son." She held up a paper for him to look at. "This is a warrant for your arrest."

The prince looked terrified, and the guards looked nonplussed. "It is for the abductions of thousands of people throughout the universe, and the unauthorized manhunt of Bram Douglas." Ashildr Glanced at Bram for a moment when she said that. "A-are you going to tell them where I am?" ask Drosh finally. "I already did." Ash threw the paper at him and stalked back down the stairs.

She reached Clara and looked at her for the first time. ' _Hey, are you alright?'_ Her expression didn't give anyway any emotion at all but her words seemed a little worried. Without actually saying anything out loud, Ash Soniced Clara's handcuffs off. ' _Let's please get out of here.'_ She took Clara's hand leading her to the TARDIS.

"Ash, wait." Clara saw that everyone was watching them, even Bram. She glanced at him pointedly. ' _That's who Drosh has been after. Can't we give him a lift? I'm sure he didn't do whatever it was that Drosh was chasing him for. I mean, a kid who kidnapped thousands of people just to find on guy who wasn't even convicted, could have easily made a mistake in thinking Bram killed someone.'_ She hoped that by speaking to Ash mind-to-Mind she could convince her. After a pause, Ashildr noded. ' _Fine, Whatever.'_

"Bram. We can give you a lift out of here if you'd like. Our ship can take you back home or wherever you want to go." Ashildr still held her hand as Clara spoke. At her words Bram's eyes lit up and he responded eagerly. "That would be fantastic, thanks!"


	6. CH 55: Traveling Companion

_**Here is that weird half-chapter I talked a little about. I wrote it like this because there is not enough adventure to make a full chapter. This is like a DW minisode where you don't HAVE to read it to understand the next adventure, but it explains away plot-holes that you would find if you watched the two full episodes without it.**_

 _ **I hope you enjoy!**_

 _ **-Skwick**_

* * *

 **Chapter 5.5 - Traveling companion:**

Ashildr wandered back into the control room from elsewhere in the depths of the TARDIS. She glanced at the screen which showed the diner, and saw that Clara and Bram were still chatting at the bar. Oscar rubbed himself against her legs and she picked him up. The TARDIS seemed to like the cat, it had taken care of him while Clara and Ash had been adventuring on Ragous, and to her surprise Oscar was able to find his was around the infinite hallways and rooms of their ship.

When Ash had gotten back to the TARDIS, the cat had been asleep on the console. She _had_ told Clara that she couldn't keep a cat in a time machine, but it seemed that he would be staying. Pets were worse than humans… they only lived for a moment- not even long enough to blink. Though, she admitted, cats were better than most humans when it came to company.

He meowed at her and she replied "Yes, my thoughts exactly. I don't know why he is here ether. Clara does what she wants, doesn't she?" He sniffed her face, and she sighed. "Talking to a cat.." she muttered. He struggled in her arms and squirmed his way onto her shoulders. He draped himself around the back of her neck, purring loudly.

Ashildr didn't know if she should go out and talk other actual people, or if she should stay away. When she had agreed to give Bram a lift, they'd taken the TARDIS off Drosh's ship, but not anywhere in particular. Just to deep space. Ash hadn't gotten a chance to ask where he wanted to go before he and Clara had taken off on a (long) conversation about plants, and princes, and who knows what else, so she'd left them to it.

Watching them talk on the screen, she decided to go into the diner. With Oscar still on her shoulders, she opened the door and stepped out of the control room. "Hey!" said Clara when she saw her. Apparently Clara had cut off Bram, because his mouth was hanging open mid-word. "Hey. What's going on in here?" She said lightly. As she approached them Clara reached out to pet the cat. "We were just exchanging stories. Bram here is a traveler too." Clara was looking back and forth between him and Ash.

"Oh, really? That's very interesting." She tried to sound polite and engaged, but she didn't really want him here in the TARDIS. He had been, chased for suspected murder, after all. It wasn't up to her, though, Clara was the boss. "Yeah, I've been floating around for a while now." He said with a big smile. She would have rolled her eyes, but looking as young as she did, and having a cat on her shoulders like a scarf already made her look like a teenager- she didn't need him actually believing that.

"I just came out here to ask if you were ready to have us fly you home yet, and if not, to let you know that I'll be in the library." She turned from Bram to Clara as she talked. ' _How much do you actually know about him, Clara? He was thought to be a killer.'_ Ash caught her friend's eye as she silently spoke to her. She saw that Bram was looking at her very intently, and she cleared her throat.

"I'll come get you to help me fly the TARDIS when we're ready, Alright?" Ash thought that Clara was trying to sound soothing, but it came out more patronizing. "Yes, Alright. See you." She turned and walked away calmly. Ashildr didn't understand why she felt so unsettled around Bram, she didn't know him at all. Ash hated not knowing. She told herself that he'd be gone soon, and walked with Oscar to her library to write all about Ragous and the bird-prince.

* * *

"Ray of sunshine, isn't she?" Bram commented when Ashildr was gone. Clara rested her chin on her hand, and her elbow on the table. "Ashildr is just protective." She explained slowly. Ash meant well, though she didn't really understand the importance of human interaction anymore.

"I don't think she likes me." He said conversationally. Clara laughed. "I am probably the only person that Ash _likes._ I could count the number of people I've seen her even be nice to one hand." Clara had considered making Ash people-skills-cards like the ones she'd made for the doctor, but decided against it. (the Doctor just didn't know how to be kind, while Ash did, she just mostly didn't bother to.)

Clara knew that Ashildr was mostly just traveling with her to make sure that she got to Gallifrey eventually, but a little part of her wanted to believe that Clara might be helping to teach Ash happiness again. "How long have you two known each other?" Bram asked. Clara smiled, her eyes shining. "That's a very complicated question. I met first Ashildr a little over a year ago, and we starting traveling together just a few weeks ago. But she's known me a lot longer." She normally didn't really explain their situation to people, but he'd asked, and she'd just responded without thinking it through.

"You make no sense sometimes…" He added. "Yes, that's the charm though, isn't it?" She said with a smirk. He leaned back a little and watched her with curiosity. "So," she continued, "What will you do next? Where will the lonely traveler find himself this time?" She tried to keep the conversation light, she'd just had a very long day.

When Ashildr had saved them Clara had been amazed. She remembered a time when she'd applauded Madame Vastra for calling the police- that's what Ash had done to keep the people of Ragous safe. She'd even proven that Drosh had been wrong to chase Bram, and that he hadn't been convicted of any crimes. "Hey, don't change the subject, what do you mean she's known you longer than you've known her? You started a story, be prepared to finish it!" Bram argued.

"...Time travel. This ship doesn't only travel in space, but also time. Traveling in a TARDIS can make things complicated. (Mind you, Is wasn't actually _this_ TARDIS that made our relationship complicated..) anyway, Ash is older than she looks." Clara was almost surprised to hear her own voice explaining.

She hadn't meant to say that, she didn't think… it wasn't really her place to give away Ashildr's secrets, and she normally didn't. She must be tired and not on top of things because of her wild adventure with a pre-teen-prince. Bran smiled at her, his head tilted a little to one side.

About an hour later, their conversation Slowed, and then stopped. Clara decided that he didn't have to go yet if he didn't want to. The TARDIS made him a room when she asked, (which she was frankly surprised at, seeing as her TARDIS doesn't normally listen to her all that well,) and he'd gratefully gone to bed. Clara went to go find Ashildr before she went to sleep herself.

Getting places in the ship often proved to be more difficult than she'd like. She didn't think the TARDIS was trying to be inconvenient, more like it got distracted easily, and so it lead her all over the place before she got when she wanted to go. Then again, maybe the ship _did_ play tricks on her, because Ash never had that problem. The TARDIS always took _her_ wherever in the ship she wanted to go right away.

When Clara finally got to the library door, it slid open for her. She leaned in the doorway. "Ash?" Ashildr had her eyes on her book. She was in her chair by the fire, writing, not reading. Oscar was asleep next to her. "Mm," she responded quietly. Clara walked in and sat on the chair next to her. "Bram didn't know where he wanted to go yet, so… I let him stay here to rest for a while." Ashildr looked up at that. Her expression was blank of any emotion, which meant she didn't know what response Clara wanted.

"Ok. How long do you think he'll be here?" She asked in what Clara decided was a relaxed tone. "Not sure… but I mean, there is plenty of room on the TARDIS, isn't there?" Clara ask nervously. Ash looked at her for a long pause, probably trying to find the intent in Clara's words. "Yes, of course there is." she went back to writing, but Clara knew she was still paying attention.

"Is it ok that he is here? I know I didn't really ask you, and you don't know him…" Clara watched her hand moving up and down to form neat looping letters on the page. "Clara, It's your TARDIS. The doctor left it for you, and even the ship itself thinks it's yours. Of course you can have whoever you want on it. Honestly, I don't pay that much attention to mortals anymore and I don't mind at all if you keep one around." Ash didn't look up ask she spoke softly. Her dark hair hug, obstructing her face just enough to hide her eyes from Clara.

"It's yours too." Clara whispered. The ship seemed to hum very quietly in agreement. Ash didn't reply, she just kept writing. After a while of sitting and watching the fire crackle, Clara stood and spoke again. "I'm going to go to sleep now." She watched Ash _not_ look at her. ' _I'll see you later.'_ Clara responed to Ash's silence.


	7. CH 6: Chatting in Bristol

_**Another chapter. I don't consider this one late because I did the half-chapter recently. ..or maybe that's just what I'm telling myself. Anyway, this chapter is not adventurous, but I promise the next one is. We get to see a familiar face for this chapter. Enjoy!**_

 _ **-Skwick 3**_

* * *

 **Chapter 6 - Chatting in Bristol:**

"Where are we?" Ashildr walked into the console room with her arms crossed behind her back. She'd come to see where Clara had brought the TARDIS when she'd felt the jolt of flying and then landing. Bram was standing with two hands on the console looking like a bird with ruffled feathers.

Clara avoided her eyes as she struggled to form an answer. "We are in Bristol…" Ash narrowed her eyes. "Why would bring Bristol make me unhappy?" She asked with a raised eyebrow. When Clara just blinked at her, she elaborated "Your expression says that I'm going to disapprove of this somehow. What are you hoping I don't ask?" Bram looked at Clara, Ashildr, then back to Clara. Ash thought about how Bram was acting as Clara's companion like she had been the Doctor's.

"She said we are here to give someone an explanation." Bram said, trying to be helpful.' _Oh,'_ thought Ash. She knew what they were here for and Clara had been right to assume that Ashildr wouldn't like it. Reflecting on it, Ash should have known that this would come up sooner or later- of course Clara would want to do this.

"You want to see Rigsy." Clara recovered from the betrayed face she shot at Bram and nodded at Ash. "Yes, but before you start, let me just remind you that one: I've been time traveling longer than you and _I know_ that I have to be careful, and two: (sorry for the guilt trip but) you dragged him into this in the first place and if it wasn't for me you could have cost him his life!" Ash glanced at Bram briefly. She didn't like having conversation as delicate as this one around non-involved parties.

"If it wasn't for you, you and he would _both_ have your lives." She whispered, her arms crossed in disagreement. "This is not a good plan, you know that, don't you? What would you even say to him? 'Oh, hey, by the way, not dead! Well, yes dead... But not for a while!' Why bother?" Ash saw the anger that flared in Clara's eyes at her words.

"'Why bother?'" She echoed with a subtle threat in her voice. "Because that poor boy thinks I died for him. He thinks you _proper_ killed me!" Clara was about to say more but she stopped herself as if she'd come to another conclusion. Very slowly, she continued on a different track. "Ashildr, did you wipe his memory of Trap street?" She knew that the slowness of Clara's words was out of anger and disbelief.

"No, I didn't." She replied simply. Ash remembered reading in her journals about how he'd begged to keep his memories, and that she had allowed it because she'd needed him to help her form a story about Clara's death. The two of them had lied to the school Clara worked at, Clara's father, and Gran, and anyone else who asked about her. Ash had decided that it was better to make up some death rather than let her just go missing.

While speaking to Clara's family she'd learned about Danny Pink- Clara's Boyfriend who had passed a few years before her. Ashildr had wondered whether he had been alive for Clara when she'd first met Ash in her viking village, but she'd maybe not. Ashildr could tell a lot about a person by they way they held themselves, and according to her diaries, even then Clara had walked like she was missing the second set of footsteps belonging to someone she'd lost.

At Ash's words, Clara sighed with relief and turned to Bram. "Ready to go find a human-who-thinks-I'm-dead-and-is-not-really-wrong-but-should-stop-being-sad-about-it-because-ta-da-here-I-am?" She pointedly didn't look back at Ash as she started for the door to the diner.

"Clara… this going to mess with history." Ashildr knew that Clara knew that it was a bad idea. But she also knew that Clara didn't really care. Clara finally turned back and looked Ash in the eyes when she said "I know this is risky. But it's not fair to let him think I'm properly dead. I told him not to feel guilty, but goodness knows that didn't do anything to stop him -It hasn't stopped you- Don't you care if he thinks you are a murder or not? Because right now, he thinks you are responsible for my death. Now I can talk him out of thinking that, and you won't let me!" Ash saw that Clara was looking for support in her eyes.

She wanted to tell her that no, she didn't care if one man who lived, and died, billions of years ago thinks she'd killed Clara, but... Clara didn't want her friend to think badly of Ashildr. How could Ash stop her? "I never said I wasn't letting you. Even if I told you not to go, you wouldn't listen to me anyway. But I am coming with you to make sure you don't break the universe by telling some kid about fixed points in time."

Clara's expression was grateful. "What made you think that I'd ever want to go without you?" She said sweetly. "The fact that you didn't tell me you were going anywhere?" Ash mocked her innocent tone with her own over-enthusiastic questioning voice. Clara just smiled and gestured for Ash and Bram to follow her out of the TARDIS.

They reached Rigsy's flat a little while later. Ashildr saw Clara getting progressively less confident as they walked. Her steps had become smaller as she looked around the streets to see normal people from her time period going about their day. She wished she could comfort Clara somehow- she didn't like seeing her so visibly unhappy.

Just as she was thinking about it, Clara's shoulders relaxed again, and she looked back at Ash. Through the telepathic connection she got a warm feeling from Clara. Apparently she'd noticed Ash noticing her. The younger woman was grateful that her fellow immortal had recognized her unease.

"When are we?" She asked both Clara and Bram. Clara was quick to respond "A week after I die. … _Died_." Ash gave her an apologetic look but Clara didn't see it. "What did you tell everyone?" Ashildr was half-surprised that Clara wanted to talk about this in front of Bram, who didn't fully understand what they were talking about.

"That you died. Your family and your friends think that you were killed doing some work for UNIT. It took me a little digging to decide that that would be an appropriate excuse seeing as you spent a lot of time working on dangerous UNIT missions." She explained. They reached Rigsy's apartment door. (They'd just soniced they're way through the main door of the building.)

When Clara didn't ask anything else, Ash knocked. The three of them waited outside the door for a few beats before it swung open. Rigsy stood before them seeming distracted. After actually looking at them, he saw Clara. He froze. Without saying anything he looked from Ashildr, to Clara, to Ashildr, and back to Clara where his gaze stayed. She smiled at him and gave him a small wave.

"Rigsy, we can explain…" Ashildr said calmly. He brushed past her and wrapped his arms around Clara. "Oh my god. Is it really you? Are you really alive?" Clara made an 'Oof' sound as he hugged her. When he pulled back he couldn't seem to stop staring at her.

"Yes and no…" Clara started, looking uncomfortable. "It's a long story…"

* * *

"So dead, but not yet?" All four of them were sitting in Rigsy's living room with (of course) tea for everyone. He was actually understanding better than Clara thought he would. "Yes, exactly. I _did_ actually die a week ago, but because I was pulled out of my own time stream right before that, I am able to be here now."

Rigsy studied her face as though if he kept looking at her, she'd stay right there forever. Safe. He lifted his palm out to her. "May I?.." He asked quietly. She held out her wrist to him and he tried to find her pulse. Nothing. He made a spooked face. "It still freaks _me_ out, don't worry about it." She said with a smile.

From the other room, Lucy started to cry. Rigsy finally looked away from Clara and started to stand. "It's ok, I'll go." Ashildr put a hand on his shoulder briefly as she walked out of the room. He sighed. Moments later his daughter quieted. "And you have your own TARDIS now?" He asked half-amused.

"Yes! Ours looks like an american diner." She said proudly. "Ours?" He glanced at Bram and Clara realized with a little embarrassment that she hadn't actually introduced them. "Rigsy, this is Bram. He is traveling with Ashildr and I for the time being." She explained. "Bram, Rigsy. He's a friend." They gave each other a greeting nod.

"So you even have your own companion, huh? When I first met you, Clara, you pretended to be the doctor. Now you are running about the universe with your own TARDIS and companions! What does he think of that?" Rigsy laughed a little until he saw Clara's expression. "That's the other thing, Rigsy. The doctor… he doesn't remember me." She looked into her tea cup as she explained.

"What? What do you mean?" She'd underestimated how hard this part would be. "When he tried to save me, he risked the whole universe. Until I get back to my timestream, the universe is only expecting that that's what I _will_ do, and acting accordingly. If for some reason I don't, the universe would collapse and the world would end. The doctor risked all that to try and bring me back. We both knew that he'd gone to far and that we couldn't be together any longer. All his memories of me were wiped." Each word was hard to say, even though she knew that everything she said was true. She _knew_ she had to be away from him. But that didn't mean she'd miss her Doctor's gruff attitude or horrible jokes any less.

"I _think_ I understand." Rigsy said slowly. "This also means that if you ever see him again, you can't mention me at all. He can't know anything more than he does. Actually, you can't tell anyone that you saw me…" Clara decided she should have thought that sentence through more before starting it.

Ashildr walked back into the room holding Lucy. The baby's wide eyes observed Clara with innocent curiosity. " _Hi baby!"_ She paused her important conversation to say hello. Ash stepped closer and placed the infant in Clara's outstretched arms. As she held her, Lucy looked more and more confused, until her quivering lip lead to tears.

"Oh, don't cry!" Clara rocked her gently. It didn't help, she just kept wailing. "No pulse, right? Babies are used to people with heartbeats." Bram offered timidly. Clara knew he was right. Most people didn't rely on a person's heartbeat to prove they were alive, but Lucy was used to being held by someone who made a soothing 'thump, thump,' noise.

Clara reluctantly handed the baby back. Ash bounced her in her arms until Lucy quieted. Clara found it amusing that Ash was willing to befriend a baby, but not even Bram, who was a full-grown person that was staying with them. She watched the two of them with fondness for a moment before she refocused on the conversation.

"No one can know that I am running about the universe. If people know than the doctor might find out and he'll come looking for me. He's my best friend, but we need to stay away from each other." She watched Rigsy closely as she explained. He seemed to understand. "I think I get it." Everyone was quiet for a moment before he added "I guess you've had to have a lot of people stop talking about you to him, haven't you?"

Ash looked over at Clara. _'I never said ALL humans are useless… just most. But this one is alright. He's quick.'_ She smiled at her from behind Rigsy's view. ' _Ashildr, you are a human too. You seem to be forgetting that.'_ Clara didn't look at Ash while she made her counter, instead she focused on Rigsy.

"Actually, we need to start doing that… there are a few people that need to know. Particularly someone in UNIT." The last part she said quieter, but Rigsy still made a connection. "You mean that lady… Kate? Kate Stewart?" Clara was amazed he knew Kate, let alone that he could know who she was talking about from such little context.

"We spoke to Kate I think. Rigsy, how much does she know?" Ash spoke up and Rigsy looked over his shoulder to respond. "It was just the day before yesterday, don't you pay attention to anyone?" He very clearly didn't like Ashildr. Clara didn't blame him, her actions at Trap street had been… to say the least, not great.

"Rigsy." Clara said cooly. "It's been a couple days for _you._ Time travel, reminder? Be polite." She lost the distaste in her voice quickly and teased him instead.

"Anyway- Kate knows what I knew. That you died of non-treatral causes and that we couldn't tell people the truth. She doesn't know about Trap street or the details of what happened there. She thinks you are dead." Rigsy went back to looking intently at Clara.

"Do you think she needs to know more than that?" Ashildr asked Clara. "She needs to know that she can't mention me to the doctor. Also that I have a TARDIS… UNIT will notice it eventually and it would be really annoying if they messed with it." She was basically just thinking aloud, but Ash, Bram, and Rigsy were all looking at her expectantly.

"Do you want to go do that now?" Rigsy very clearly wanted to help. She thought on it for a moment. ' _Kate needs to know what is going on, but she's not going to like it. She is the kind of person who won't understand the point of 'eventually.' She won't approve of my 'goodbye tour,' and I don't really want to have that conversation with her right now.'_ Clara didn't think Bram and Rigsy would understand her hesitation, but Ash would. _'goodbye tour...'_ echoed Ash in her head. "I think I'd rather call her. Later." Clara decided.

They all talked for a long time after that. It was mostly casual conversation about Rigsy's life, or Bram's plans for adventure. Having truly light hearted conversation was a nice change of pace for Clara. Ashildr had put Lucy back in her bed and joined Clara on the sofa. While Bram told a story about a whale and an Alien, Clara thought about what they'd do next.

She knew that having Bram along wouldn't work for a long time, only for a few adventures. But nevertheless she enjoyed his company and he seemed to enjoy the idea of time-travel. She'd have to take him on a proper outing next rather than drag him alone on another trip he knew next to nothing about.

When they finally decided to leave, Clara invited Rigsy for a TARDIS adventure. She knew he'd politely refuse, which he did, but she wanted to offer anyway. Clara hugged him, he wished her a good life between heartbeats, and then she, Ash, and Bram made their way back to the TARDIS.

"Where to next?" Asked Bram seeming excited. He and Clara walked behind Ash. She was sure that Ashildr was at least half-listening in, but she didn't really mind. "Up to you! We just did a trip for me, and Ashildr never usually cares where we go, so it's your turn to pick. Anywhere in time in space is yours to choose from." Clara loved that part. She loved being able to share the universe with people.

The doctor had shown it to her, and then she'd been able to show other people (such as some of her students) other worlds and times as well. It filled her with joy to have someone just as excited about adventuring travel with her. Ash didn't ever complain about their travels, and Clara knew she'd never question her decision to take the long way round, but she didn't have any _wonder_ left in her to spend on TARDIS trips.

Bram would be entertaining to have aboard. "Hm… let's see. Hard decision to make, huh?" He responded as they reached the ship. "How about…" He trailed off. "Oh, Surprise me!" Bram finished. Clara smiled.


	8. CH 7: Nearly a Sacrifice

_**I had A lot of fun with this chapter, and the end(ish) part is starting the plot for an idea I have wanted to write for a long time. My favorite part of doctor who is the banter, and though mine is not nearly as good, I try! Hope you enjoy. Comments/positive feedback are appreciated as always!**_

 _ **-Skwick**_

* * *

 **Chapter 7 - Nearly a sacrifice**

"This would have gone a lot better if we had checked the lifeform scanner before we left the TARDIS." Ashildr all but spat at Clara. "Is this how you two always spend your weekends?" Bram questioned half-amused, half-concerned.

"You," Clara whirled to face him. "Stop doubting me! And you," She turned to Ash, "Stop being a grump. Just because you were right, you are going to let us be sacrificed to the gods of this planet instead of helping out?" The three time-travelers were standing before the cone of a volcano on an alien planet. The volcano wasn't active, but never the less, it was a long, long drop to a hard bottom.

"It couldn't kill you! _You can't die._ It probably couldn't even kill me. And seeing as this is _his_ fault, I wouldn't care if the fall kills _him_." Ash continued defensively. She didn't actually know if the part about Clara was true or not. Clara hadn't been hurt (or been in a scenario where she should have gotten hurt but wasn't,) so far since she was pulled out of her time-stream. That meant that they were unaware of weather she _could_ be hurt or killed. Ashildr definitely didn't want to find out, so she made an assumption that made her feel better.

Ash would have kept on about how stupid Bram had been to provoke the natives of the plant, but the crowd behind them started to chant again. He had been rude enough to the aliens that he'd convinced the entire village that he, Ash, and Clara were all sent by some unholy creature and therefore should be killed for a sacrifice.

When the three had arrived on the planet it had been day, but it had gotten dark extremely quickly. Now it was pitch black. Ashildr wouldn't have been able to see even Bram and Clara (who were right next to her) if it wasn't for the few electric light posts. All three of them had their hands tied with some gross, sticky, lengths of cloth.

Clara shot her an angry look. "Ok. Anyway- time for a plan. Any ideas?" The younger woman looked back and forth between her two companions. "Aren't _you_ the almighty plan maker?" The shorter woman challenged right back. Clara rolled her eyes. Ash knew that she was being unhelpful, but this situation could have been avoided on multiple occasions if Clara had just listened to her. Instead, Clara had been to intent on giving Bram an amazing adventure that she'd ignored Ashildr's various warnings and suggestions that would have kept them all from danger.

The large group of People behind them shouted and clapped. They were responding to the chief of their clan who was saying some prayer-speech asking their gods to accept the sacrifice. In all her life, Ash had never seen sacrifice actually work. It was originally made up to keep power amongst people, she knew. If the leader of a group didn't like someone for some reason, like they were challenging authority or spreading rumors, then they would be sacrificed. The whole idea of the death being carried out to please some god(s) was only added to justify murder. Weather this chief knew that sacrifice didn't work, or if he wasn't aware of the creepy reasons behind, Ash didn't know.

If the people of this planet would stop their hostility and excitement, than maybe she'd have been able to lecture them about the moral dilemma of using religion as an excuse for executions of the innocent. While Ashildr was thinking about weather or not this whole ordeal could be turned into a teaching moment for these random aliens, Clara and Bram continued to scheme.

"Ok, let's see. We are too high up to jump down and escape from the cone of the volcano, and we might not have a way out even _if_ we made it down safely." Bram whispered. Ash could tell that He was trying to impress Clara. He had been doing it the whole trip, she'd noticed. "Well, What about running? Running is always a good plan." Clara said hopefully.

"There are around seventy people behind us who will happily through us into the volcano if given the chance. We could run, but we won't get far without a distraction." Ash found herself being helpful after all. She didn't know why she'd be compelled to do such a thing when she was still cross with both of them for ignoring her before. The way she saw it, if they hadn't wanted her help then, they didn't need it now ether.

Clara seemed smug that she'd gotten Ash to help. "Good idea." Clara said. She then turned to the mob of people and cleared her throat. "Hey? Hello! Helloooooooo!" The cheif stopped mid-word and turned his eyes to Clara. Everyone in the crowd followed suit. "Something tells me you we have different meanings of 'distraction.'" Muttered Ash.

"Yes, Hi." Clara continued when everyone was looking at her. "Lovely speech, really. Well done! I just have one question," she started to slowly walk toward the raised platform the preacher was on. Bram and Ashildr exchanged a look before they both ducked, and snuck behind the people who were all facing Clara.

They tiptoed through the shadows, while Clara was walking up to the bright lights of the stage. "I hate it when she does that. What's the point of a plan if only _she_ knows it?" Ash whispered. "Don't volcano sacrifices usually happen when the volcano is active? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there something about how the offering has to burnt to be sent to your god?"

Ashildr smiled because even though what Clara was saying was complete rubbish, the way she said it made everyone there pay attention to her. Bram and Ash made their way slowly around the outside of the crowd. She was impressed that this 'distraction' was working- what kind of people let two out of three of their captives out of everyone's sight?

"The gods must be satisfied!" Responded the chief when Clara reached him. "I'm sure they must." She agreed wholeheartedly. "But how will your gods get the offerings if we are just lying on the bottom of a dormant volcano?" Her tone was so innocent, so convincingly trying to help. While Clara and the chief continued to go back and forth on traditions and methods of executing people, Ash wondered about what they should do next.

' _Kill the lights.'_ Clara's voice trailed in and out of her head. That would work, Ash decided. "We need to get the sunglasses back from thug number one." She whispered hurriedly to Bram who was already looking expectantly at her. He nodded and looked around for the people who had bound their hands and brought them to the edge of the volcano. His face lit up when he spotted them, and Ash followed his eyes to their target.

He was a short, plump, man with the same blue and green paint on his face and chest as all the rest of the people around them. The people looked like human mutants. All their eyes were too close together, their oversized hands hung on too long arms, and they walked a little bent over.

Ash gestured for Bram to stay put, and stay hidden. She cut off the rope that held her hands with the sharp edge of a nearby fence. Then she was able to slip between people until she got close enough. She was undetected as long as she stayed quiet. When she was near the man, she stayed still for a moment before reaching out and pick-pocketing the sonic sunglasses back. Ashildr hurried back to Bram and was relieved to get back unnoticed.

Clara was still on the stage chatting away. while talking, she glanced at Ashildr for one moment too long. The chief noticed her looking, and suddenly remembered that he had other captives. "The sacrifice!" He cried. "Get them back!" He grabbed Clara by the wrist as everyone else started to swarm Ash and Bram.

Bran looked frantically to Ashildr- they were about to be captured again, and then they'd never get away! Thinking fast, Ash bolted for the nearest light post. She jumped up, catching a horizontal bar that was just below the lamp. Pulling herself up, she was able to sit on the bar, her legs dangling below her. Ash soniced the lamp, trying multiple settings until all the lights flickered out and the whole area was left in darkness.

* * *

Clara tried to pry her wrist free, but the sudden darkness had brought the chief to attention and he kept a tight hold on her. People were shouting and she could hear something near her left crash to the ground. With the lights off, she could barely see her own hand when she held it out in front of her. ' _Where are you guys?'_ She tried to reach Ashildr so that they could all get the heck out of there.

The man holding Clara's wrist tugged her arm so she was forced to stumble after him. "This is punishment from the gods for not receiving their sacrifice!" He Shouted so loudly right next to her face that Clara's ears began to ring. Overtop of the ringing, she was able to make out Ash's voice ' _The sunglasses let me see in the dark, I can see you. We are on our way and then we can sneak out.'_

Clara was glad Ash had figured out the sonic, she had actually forgotten to explain the plan to her when she started to chat with their captors. The Chief, whose name Clara still did not know, dragged her down the steps of the stage they'd been on. The lack of visuals didn't seem to impair his sense of direction at all. Several people bumped into them from all sides and Clara had a hard time staying on her feet when she couldn't see what was going on.

She decided that it was time to shake off the alien when she felt the surface she was walking on change from the paving stones to the grass near the edge of the volcano. Clara pulled and pulled, trying to get away. If they got to the volcano before Ashildr and Bram could reach her, she was in trouble. Starting to panic, she raised her free hand to slap blindly in the direction of where his face should be, but before she was able to hit him, another hand grabbed that wrist.

It was Ash who stopped her from slapping the chief, she knew. "Did you get her?" Clara heard Bram's voice from just behind her. Apparently Ashildr did something, because the hand trying to push Clara off a cliff, and into a volcano, let go suddenly. Then she was running blindly, following the hand that Ash held. Bram held Clara's newly freed hand, so they both trailed after Ash who could see through the darkness.

"How long until they get the lights back on?" Clara raised her voice over the chaos to ask. "Not sure. Not long though, I don't think." Ash Responded. It was hard to not stumble over your own feet when you are running in the dark, Clara found. Ashildr was right, after only a few minutes, the lights of the village that where now a little behind them turned back on.

As her eyes adjusted to the still quite dim light, Clara began to giggle. The three of them ran a lot faster when everyone could see, and when they made it to the trees beyond the last buildings of the village, they were hidden as well. "New rule!" Ash almost shouted while they ran, "Plans need to be shared with the whole party before they are put into action!" She sounded extremely cross, and Clara didn't really blame her.

"Agreed." Bram muttered, amused. After a little while of running through the trees, Clara spotted the berry bush she has taken note of when they'd left the TARDIS. She slowed to a stop, and squinted until she was able to see the slight shimmer that told her where the spaceship was. Ash spotted it too and when she touched the tips of her fingers to it, the ship lost the invisibility shield. Unlocking it, she lead the way inside.

"Let's get out of here." Said the immortal. When they were all in the control room Clara could tell how angry Ash actually was. She didn't say anything, of course, Ashildr wasn't like that. Nevertheless Clara could see the distaste in her friend's eyes. Bram stood out of the way while Ash examined the screen and Clara flipped leavers on the consol. The TARDIS shuttered as it started to take off, but then it lurched, causing the three of them to stumble.

"What was that?" Clara asked both Ash, and the ship herself. "I don't know. We didn't dematerialize, though. Did you forget to calibrate the atomic dial?" Clara knew that she hadn't forgotten, and she looked at the consol, puzzled. "Of course not." She said a little more dismissively than she'd meant too.

"Well then why didn't we take off?" Ash turned to her with her arms crossed behind her back the way she did when she was acting superior to those around her. "It wasn't anything I did!" Clara didn't think that the other immortal had reason to be this ticked off. Ash moved, and two of them stood on opposite sides of the consol, double checking all the control settings. "Try now." Ashildr said after turning a switch. Clara pulled down the release lever. The diner shook again, and again, it stopped before they got anywhere.

"We need to leave before the villagers catch up and find the TARDIS." Bram concluded. "We know that, thanks." Ash snapped over her shoulder. Clara shot her a disapproving look that she didn't see. "Can you please check and make sure they haven't already?" Clara asked. He nodded and slipped put into main diner area.

"Why do you have to be so rude to him?" She asked when Bram was gone. Not looking up at her, Ash continued to fiddle with the controls. "He's a nuisance." Clara could feel anger tense her shoulders and clench her fists. "How? He's just a person! Oh, right, you can't stand any people. You constantly act like that no one is worth keeping around, but you never give anyone a chance!" Ashildr finally raised her head and met Clara's eyes with all the threat of argument.

"Would you rather I be like you? So busy flirting with the first pretty boy you find that you have been blind to how many times he's gotten us into trouble?" Ash didn't raise her voice- she didn't grant Clara the power to make her so angry that she'd lose her self-control. "I have NOT been _flirting_ with him!" She defended. This reminded Clara of the day the doctor had regenerated. She'd had to prove to madame Vastra that she wasn't someone who fell for pretty, young men. What was it about her that made everyone think she was some kind of floozy?

Clara saw that Ash was about to shoot some remark back, but then the door opened and Bram came back in. "You guys need to come see this." He stammered and pointed. Without a word, both women followed him through the diner and out the main door. When the were back outside, Clara saw immediately what Bram was so worried about.

On both corners of the TARDIS she could see, there were huge metal objects clinging to the ship. They definitely weren't there before. The chunks of metal looked like some kind of crazy clamps, and when she ran around the ship's Exterior, she found that there were two more on the other side. Ash was already sonicing one of them when Clara made it back to the front. "These are definitely what is stopping the TARDIS from taking off." She informed them.

In the close distance, Clara heard the villagers. Bram heard it to, because he nervously craned his neck in the direction of the noise. "Can you get them off?" Clara asked urgently. Bram disappeared back inside the diner for a reason he didn't share with the others. "Working on it. Here, hold this." Clara crouched to help her as the noise of people got closer.

Knowing that she had to stay focused on freeing the TARDIS so they could get away, Clara pushed the oncoming threat from her mind. She was so intent on the task at hand, that she didn't hear or see Bram behind them. All that Clara remembered was her hands on the clamps, then the feeling of falling, then a cold, consuming, black nothingness.


	9. CH 8: I know she'll never believe me

_**I'm back and I'm sorry this one is late. This Fanfic is getting a little more gay than I had intended, and I'm not disliking it. Fair warning, the next chapter will take a while to post because I will be SUPER busy next week. I had fun with this one, though as i wrote it i made myself sad. Same as when I wrote the argument for the last chapter when i was writing them fighting at the same time as going "dOnT yUo LoVe EaChoThEr." Enjoy!**_

 _ **-Skwick**_

* * *

 **Chapter 8 - I know she'll never believe me:**

Ashildr didn't know how many times she'd been knocked out. Each time she would wake up with hazy memories of what happened, try to get away, and then black out again. From a lot of experience, she knew that a blow that could knock out a normal human for hours would only keep _her_ down for minutes. In theory, being able to jump back up and fight another day would be beneficial. In truth, though, she'd found that it was nothing but painful and exhausting.

Bram had come out of nowhere, she remembered. He'd hit Clara over the head knocking her unconscious right away. She hadn't even known it was possible for Clara to be knocked out, though it wasn't too far of a stretch seeing as Clara was able to sleep just as if she were alive. Ash had put up much more of a fight of course, but somehow more people appeared from nowhere to fight by Bram's side, and she had not prevailed.

Almost every time she regained consciousness, Ashildr found herself somewhere slightly different. For the first while Clara was beside her, but at some point whoever was holding them captive separated the two. Now, in what she thought to be an old parkade, she was alone with just Bram and two people she did not know.

They were muttering about stupid human-hybrids who 'wouldn't stay the fuck unconscious.' Ash didn't bring their attention to her. After many attempts she'd learned that she would need to regain a little strength before trying to take them on again. While she took deep breaths to stop her head from spinning, Ashildr finally got to thinking about what was going on.

She focused on what she knew. One, Bram had betrayed them. ' _At least that's the only explanation I can think of to justify knocking out both of your new traveling buds.'_ She concluded. Two, She didn't know where the TARDIS was. Maybe Bram had it, or it was still on the planet with the aliens who wanted to throw them into a volcano. Three, most importantly, she didn't know where Clara was.

' _Clara, where are you? Are you alright?'_ Ash tried to focus her mind enough to get the telepathic connection working. Just as she was trying to reach Clara, Bram saw that she was awake. He stopped his conversation, stepped closer to Ash, and crouched next to her (she was lying on the ground.) "Why don't you stay knocked out?" His tone was so nonplussed and curious- it made her even more mad.

If he was talking to her, she hoped that meant he wasn't going to knock her out _again._ "Long story." She pulled herself up to one knee to be at eye level with him. "What the hell is going on?" Ash decided she'd been asking that question a lot since she started to travel in the TARDIS. When he just regarded her with disgust instead of replying, Ashildr stood up.

Pain bit at her legs and hands, but absolutely devoured her head. It was times like this that she was very glad she'd mastered hiding what she was feeling a long time ago. Ash was sure that Bram didn't have a clue about how hard it was for her to think properly or move quickly. "I thought we were becoming friends, Bram, what happened?" She said with bland mockery.

"'What happened' is that you are not nearly as impressive as the legends and stories say, Ashildr. I thought you'd have found me out within a week, but you _never_ caught on to the real story, did you?" While Bram began his evil-genius-monologue, she let half of her attention drift to the goons behind him. She was definitely able to keep up with his story at the same time as cataloging the other threats in the room. That was another thing- the room. Without turning her head away from Bram, Ashildr observed everything she needed to know about her location in a moment.

The men were of Bram's species. Recognizing that made Ash feel dumb for not having looked into what exactly that species was, and what they were all about. They seemed to just be backup in case she tried to fight her way free again. One was tall with the same beautiful skin tone and face structure as Bram, and the other was average height with darker skin. The building she had regarded for a parking lot seemed to be more of a huge workshop for metal and woodwork. It had many walls that cut off halfway into the room to form nooks and crannies

She jumped back into paying full attention to him when he started to talk about the TARDIS. "There have only been two TARDISs spotted within the closest few galaxies in the last hundred years or so. One little one that pops around, and yours. We thought it would be hard to get it from you, but that was exactly like taking candy from a baby." Ashildr knew that most people with a secret plan would happily give it all away if you listened long enough. It was either to gloat about how clever the plan was, or to justify evil actions through explanations.

"That's what all this is about? You want our TARDIS?" Crossing her arms, Ash switched her weight from one foot to the other, trying to find the stance which was least painful for her battered body. Once she had been worried that the Mire chip could be damaged if she was hit in the head, but after a very crazy few years when she had wanted to remove her own immortality, she'd learned the hard way it was indestructible. That was good this time, though, it meant that if she kept them talking for just a little while longer she'd be back to full strength and could take them out easily.

"TimeLords make the most remarkable space-time crafts in the universe!" Bram exclaimed as if she were being ridiculous. "Clara would have taken you wherever you wanted in time and space just to show off. You didn't need to kidnap us and steal it. You know the TARDIS most likely won't fly for you, right?" The tall guy behind Bram elbowed the other with a snicker. Apparently she was missing something.

"I know who you are, a detail you oddly didn't acknowledge, but do you know who I am?" Bram said with an annoying satisfaction in his tone. Being as old as she was meant that a lot of people knew her. She was never surprised when someone knew the bare minimum of her story. Ashildr tilted her head to the side slightly to say 'do explain.' He grinned a wicked grin back at her and she concluded that she wouldn't be getting an explanation.

"Why are we keeping her here? We have the ship, we have the other one, can't we get out of here already?" The short man seemed very bored of all this conversation. For his credit, that was actually a good question. What did he want with Ashildr if he had the TARDIS? Did he believe her that the ship wouldn't fly for him and so he needed her?

"Hush!" Hissed Bram. He glared at the two men before returning to his conversation with Ash. "You know where Gallifrey is, don't you?" He asked quietly. She found it odd he knew what Gallifrey was, and more odd that he seemed interested in it. "No." She lied smoothly. Why did he want to find the planet of the timelords? It was hidden from the rest of the universe. "See, I think you do."

This was going nowhere, Ashildr decided. _'Clara?'_ It was concerning that she hadn't responded yet. Because she was still watching him as she tried to reach Clara, Ash noticed Bram tilt his head at her. "Oh, stop trying. She's probably still unconscious, and even if she's not, she won't want to talk to you." Ash made sure to show none of the surprise she felt. What? Bram knew she was talking mind-to-Mind with Clara?

"Excuse me?" She said as if she didn't know what he was calling her out on. "You really are thick, aren't you? You didn't think to look me up when she let me travel with you? Here's a tip, if you are trying to keep someone for ransom, be careful as to who you let near them." Between all his weak insults, Bram shared actual information. He thought that Ash was going to take Clara back to Gallifrey for whatever reward the timelords where offering for her.

That's why he wanted to know where planet was, too. _He_ wanted the reward. She bet he thought he found the jackpot when he found a TARDIS with a valuable prize inside. "In hindsight, I should have payed more attention to you…" she said slowly. Ashildr knew she needed to keep her options open. If she could let him believe this scenario he'd dreamed up where Ash was only pretending to be Clara's friend, then she might last longer here.

' _Yes you should have, Lady Me.'_ Bram's voice was sly, and dark, and cold, as if invaded her mind. She wanted to scrunch up her face and shiver to rid herself of his stench. "How are you even doing that?" Her voice had more emotion in it than she'd intended. The other two people in the room exchanged a look of confusion- they hadn't heard Bram, only she had.

"Walk with me." He nodded some command to the other men, and turned his back to her to walk down the length of the large room. Ash followed hesitantly, and neither of them said anything more as they walked. All the pain of being beat up had almost subsided, and she was able to move smoothly again. Past a turn that took them out of the metalwork area, Bram lead the four of them down a large hallway that slightly declined as a ramp. It was so long she couldn't see the bottom.

They walked for a long time. The whole while Ash's mind was racing with questions about Bram and how she'd get out of this one. Bram opened a door at the bottom of the long ramp, and when they went through it Ash took in an astonished breath at the room before them. It was a huge chamber that looked like a warehouse-turned-office. There were a few people of many different species about, all doing various things and not paying any attention to them.

"My species is one of great ability. We have telepathic abilities that surpass much of the rest of the universe. Letting me into your TARDIS was not a good idea- it wasn't hard to listen in on your conversations with Clara." Ash felt like she was going to be sick. She _had_ been really stupid. She'd let Clara bring a stranger into their powerful ship and ignored all her instincts that told her he was bad news.

Looking back on it, of course he'd been listening in! Ash had noticed him understanding things that she'd only explained to Clara, (or the other way round.) She knew she needed to focus. What happened, happened, and she couldn't change the past. What she could do is figure out what to do next. "Sure, I believe you. But what was the point of staying with us? If you could take both of us out, which you did, then why make her trust you before taking her to Gallifrey? Oh, you don't know where it is. _And_ you can't fly the ship, which you know is the only way you'd be able to get there."

"And you do." He turned to face her excitedly. "You can help me get her back to the timelords. I'll let you go then, and we can split the reward." It was hard for her not to punch him right there. He was still under the impression that she wanted to take Clara unwillingly to her death! But, as she searched his gaze for signs of mockery, she knew the best was out was to go along with this.

"You want me to give myself up- to let Clara know the real reason why I've been traveling with her?" She forced herself to stay calm as she fitted herself to a story Bram would believe. Ash needed to follow his plan just long enough to get Clara back, and get them to the TARDIS. Then they would be ok.

"Are you in? Know that if you refuse my generous offer I _will_ find other means of getting to gallifrey and you would be useless to me." Bram seemed to be un-invested in weather she chose to help him or not.

If Ashildr were to warn Clara about the act she'd found herself in, Bram might hear and know she was lying to him. It was an easy lie, really. He had done all the work- all she had to do was let his plan play out until the right moment. She told herself ' _I KNOW she'll never believe me.'_ Ash had to trust that Clara trusted her, and play along. "I'm in. When can we go?"

* * *

She smashed her fists down on the door again, but still nothing but the banging noise of the metal came from her efforts. Clara sighed and finally gave up trying to pound her way out of the small room she'd found herself in. Her head hurt a lot from being knocked to the ground. It was curious that she couldn't feel temperature in her state of not-deadness, but she could still be hurt. At least some knew knowledge came out of this whole ordeal.

Sitting down against the wall across from the door, Clara tried to piece together what she knew to come up with some sort of believable story. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the wall to think it over. Bram, who she'd thought to be a just some guy trying to escape unrightful incarnation by a crazy bird-alien prince, and who she had considered to be her friend, had knocked her out. She thought. (It was a bit of a haze in her mind really.)

She knew she'd sent Bram out of the room so she could yell at Ashildr, he'd come back telling them that someone put clamps on the TARDIS, and then when Clara had tried to figure them out, she'd blacked out. It wasn't Ashildr who knocked her out, she was convinced. Firstly, Ash had been next to her the whole time, and secondly, _Ashildr HADN'T knocked her out._

The only other thing she knew was that she didn't know where she was. A chill ran down her back as was forced to recall her first time meeting the doctor. Despite his best efforts, she had been lost then too. She had been uploaded to a huge network of data in the wifi, and all she could do was whine about how she didn't know where she was.

That had been the scariest day of her life up until then. Since then, she'd been in worse situations than that of course, ether in the police box TARDIS or her own diner.

She felt herself smile despite her eyes being closed at the memory of a trip just last week when she, Ashildr, and Bram, had been this close to dissection. It was things like that- the few but wonderful adventures she'd had with Bram- that made her dought the nagging feeling that he was behind this.

She sat there for a while before the door slammed open, startelling her. Her eyes shot open and she struggled to her feet. Before her was a tall man with a remarkable resemblance to Bram. "Your presence has been requested." He said with dramatic mockery.

Clara gathered her dignity around herself and was relieved to note that her headache had almost subsided. Maybe now she would try and talk to Ashildr, not that she knew where to start. "Where are we going?" She asked her escort as he lead her out of the room and into a hallway with tall ceilings. "To your ship. The boss was happy to have an easy time retrieving it." Normally, she might have taken that to mean that she was being reunited with the TARDIS, but from the tone in his voice she suspected that it wasn't like that.

Had this man's 'boss' been the person who'd grounded the TARDIS with those clamp type things? Clara made sure to pay attention to her surroundings. The hallway lead to a huge open area that appeared to be an re-furnished wearhouse. She saw a few people scurrying up and down the huge staircase and around on any of the open-sided floors.

The first thing she noticed however, was her diner. The room was so big that their TARDIS could sit in the corner and look as small as The Doctor's. From where she stood Clara could see that the metal objects that had been attached to her ship were still there. She resisted the idea to just run to it from where she was and get away this moment. It was too far away to get to before someone caught her.

The man who'd lead her in Shouted up to highest level of three floors above them. "Hey, Boss! I got the girl, can we go now?" Almost everyone who was working in the room turned to look at them and Clara suddenly felt like she might be in more danger than she had already predicted. From the balcony he'd called to, came an an aggravated "Not until we take the materializing boots off the ship!"

The voice gave it away, but Clara didn't' want to believe it was him until she saw Bram lean over the railing to shout at them. He saw her looking up at him, and from thirty feet up, he smiled wickedly at her. He _had_ knocked her out. His whole story must have been a lie! But what did Bram want with her? Loads of people would want a TARDIS like hers, but most would've killed Clara and Ashildr to take it. Clara felt a pang of fear as she considered that. Had Bram killed Ashildr? No, he couldn't have, she was practically indestructible.

As she tried to come up quickly with a clever insult to throw at him, he spoke to someone over his shoulder she couldn't see. Looking up with crossed arms, Clara took in a shuddering breath as _Ashildr_ came into view. What could she be doing up there with Bram? She felt as though someone had pulled her apart into pieces so little that she could blow away in the breeze when she saw the cool look Ash gave her.

Had she been on Bram's side this whole time? Suddenly every single memory of the last few weeks with Ashildr came rushing back to her. She couldn't have been acting all those times, she _couldn't._ And still, Clara felt herself spiral into the fear that Ashildr had never meant any of the laughter they'd shared. "The time lords have waited for you long enough, don't you think?" Ash taunted down at her.


	10. CH 9: Oh, How the Flames Roar

_***Cracks knuckles* Yes, I Know. Super late. Sorry! anyway, this one was super fun to write and i think you will enjoy it. Sidenote: I have a few ideas for chapters that include River, Jack, and 13 meeting Clara and Ashildr. (and by that i don't mean all three at once.) Is that something you all would like to see? if so, let me know.**_

 _ **-Skwick**_

 **Chapter 9 - Oh, how the flames Roar:**

It would've been _so impossibly easy_ to end this madness. To give in to the nagging compulsion to comfort Clara, to speak to her. All Ash would need to say was one word, and her heart would stop aching at Clara's pleading. ' _I don't believe him. This has to be an act. Ash, please.'_ She kept speaking while someone from Bram's team of goons tied her hands.

Ashildr felt all the pain in Clara's voice, and still she stayed silent. If she were to use the thought connection, even if she tried with all of her strength to block Bram from what she said, it'd be too risky. He might hear and know she wasn't on his side, so, she just followed him down the rickety wooden stairs to the floor where the TARDIS waited for them.

There had been very few people in Ashildr's long life that could make her this emotional. She recognized cooly that the universe had been unwise to grant her with someone to protect after all these years. Now, she only was able to keep herself in this act at the thought of being able to kill Bram when it was over. She didn't know if she _would_ , she just knew that she _could,_ and that was enough for now.

"We almost have all the clamps off, boss." Said the tall man. Ash decided to use her new found rank as a bad guy to gain some info. "How did you get them onto the TARDIS? Clara and I were inside but you were gone for only a few minutes." He gave her a proud look. "While we were being threatened by those idiotic villagers I had my team locate the coordinates of the ship so that they could beam down the clamps nearby. Then I put them on while I was out." His expression was smug. "Trust me, they were hard to put on that quickly, and it will take a few more minutes to get them off." He added with a glare to the people working on the TARDIS.

"That's why you provoked the people into sacrificing us!" She forced herself to sound impressed despite the irritation that bit at her mind. Apparently her impressed voice worked, because Bram looked even more proud of himself- like a dog who'd brought the paper to its owner.

Ashildr let herself glance over at Clara, and she saw the creeping fear in her beautiful brown eyes. That was all it took to make up her mind that Bram would pay for this. Yes, Ash hated him. Not because he'd scared Clara, but because he'd made Clara scared of Ashildr as well. "You are taking me back, back to Gallifrey, aren't you?" Came her companion's quiet voice. Ash would have replied, but thankfully Bram answered Clara's question instead.

"Why of course! They are offering quite the pretty penny for you." He sing-songed like a child. Bram seemed so different in every aspect than when he'd been pretending, and yet somehow this creepy, over excited, dramatic dude seemed to fit his good looks like a glove. "You know the TARDIS won't fly for you... And you'll have a hard time getting to Gallifrey without it." Ash could see how hard it was for Clara to be brave in that moment, though what she said was a great point. So good, Bram had already thought of and accounted for it.

"It will fly for me." Ash said with a sly smile. Bram let out a deep chuckle and walked over to the ship. Not wanting to risk letting herself stay too close to Clara without him there, Ashildr followed. A lady with bright blue skin and seemingly golden teeth was using some kind of laser on the last remaining boot. The little red ray she used to cut at the metal sent a tiny trail of smoke from the surface it hit.

Seeing just how many people were here reminded Ashildr that Bram had been chased by prince Drosh for the suspected murder of Drosh's sister. Knowing what she knew now about him now, she wondered whether he _had_ killed the princess. He seemed like a guy who didn't care about much and yet still liked to be adored by people worth his time.

The lady working on the TARDIS stood as the last piece of the clamp fell away from the corner of the ship. Ash knew her own vague plan, but she decided right then to actually figure out what she was going to do. She looked around to see what she could use for a distraction. Unlike Clara's distraction just hours ago, Ashildr's would be planned out and delicate.

Her mind buzzed with the intensity of a overly-complex scheme to escape. One helpful idea would burst in as she saw more of her surroundings that could help let them escape, and then she'd lose the last part of the plan she had come up with. All of this was so unlike her. Ashildr's Mind was always cluttered, but it was systematic and she never felt so disorganized when trying to form an idea. ' _Ashildr…'_ the honest sadness Ash could feel from Clara through the telepathic connection pushed away a lot of her hesitation and helped clear her mind.

Because the underground bunker/wearhouse was so big, the people working there used something resembling golf carts. In one passing by there were canisters of gasoline in the back. The woman who'd worked on the ship came over and whispered something in. Bram's ear, and Ash saw her opportunity right away. Suddenly, Ash remembered what had happened with the volcano worshiping aliens. Clara had known that a big group could be distracted by the blackout. If ash could recreate that now, she'd be set. Of course she didn't have the sunglasses, (which, now that she thought about it she should find,) so she would need another way to kill the lights.

She looked around making sure to appear casual. Bram spoke in a hushed voice to the woman with a odd expression on his face. As she scanned for something to help her, she listened to him say "So, apparently your cat is still in the ship…" that got some of Ashildr's attention. She would have said something silly to cover for the cat, but Clara butted in with "Don't you dare hurt him!" Her voice was defiant, if not all together completely somber.

While Bram began to relentlessly taunt Clara, Ash saw what seemed like something helpful. Between the TARDIS and the wall there was a huge external power outlet, and lying next to it, a generator that had a bunch of warning labels on it. From the looks of it, if she could get the generator plugged into the power source she might be lucky enough to cause the system it was on to short-circuit. The power bar had thick cables coming from all sides of it that ran in lots of directions over the bunker space. They looked like nice important energy-bringers that Ash could use to mess with the lighting.

It would be hard for her to get to them quickly, but she knew it was the best option when she saw Bram put on their sonic sunglasses from one of his pockets. He wore them to gloat at Clara, but at least knowing where they were gave the opportunity for Ash to get them back later.

* * *

If she still had a heartbeat, Clara knew that her pulse would be racing. Her mind was spinning with fears and doubts, but she tried desperately to listen to Bram's mockery in case he said anything useful. Her hands were in tight fits at her side as she looked stubbornly up at her friend-turned-captor. "Are you ready to leave?" Of course he didn't expect an answer, he just was having so much fun taunting her.

Being in this strange place with so many unknown people let Clara know just how helpless she was. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't catch Ashildr's eye. If Ash could hear her through their telepathic link, than she was ignoring her. That part was what ached the most. She hated now knowing weather or not she was truly alone in this fight against Bram or not. There was no way Ash could be doing this. Not after all they'd been through. Or… had she been planning this ever since Clara had hauled her along for the long way round'?

It was hard to keep tears from falling as she watched the immortal not pay any attention to her whatsoever. Clara thought the two of them had been getting closer over the last few weeks. She remembered just how horrible and distant Me had been on Trap street, but that act, 'Mayor Me' wasn't Ashildr. Clara knew that Ashildr was complicated, clever, and yes, maybe a little cold- but who could blame her? She was the oldest creature in the universe and she'd still managed to stay sane and even empathetic at times.

Bram's devilishly handsome eyes were hidden by _her_ sunglasses. Grabbing her under the elbow he dragged Clara inside the diner and through to the control room. She didn't waste her strength fighting him. Ashildr and three of Bram's followers trailed after them. Bram was watching Ash expectantly, and she gave him an exasperated sigh. "Do we really need to bring all of these people to Gallifrey? I am concerned that the timelords won't let either you or me keep the TARDIS when we try to leave. It'll be hard to get everyone back here after..." She started to enter the qwardence of the planet.

"How do you know where it is, Ashildr?" Clara hoped her voice sounded cool instead of the worried she felt. "Are you really asking _me_ how I know things? Because that is a very long and complicated answer, and I don't even think _I_ understand enough to explain it so-"

"Can we just go?" Bram cut into her explanation. "Yes, yes, ok. Here we go." She pulled down the main lever. Nothing happened. She pressed a button, pulled the lever up, and tried again. Still nothing.

"What's wrong?" Bram demanded. Ash glared at him and spat. " _You_ messed with the ship's gravity. I bet the clamps screwed up something!" Clara felt a tiny bit of hope creep into her mind as she recognized that this sounded a whole hell of a lot like stalling. "Ok," said one of the random people from Bram's team "So now what?" She sounded like she was trying to calm down Bram whose foot was tapping impatiently on the ground.

"I need to check for damage to the outside." She held out her hand to Bram. "Sunglasses." After a hesitant expression and a warning stare, her handed the sonic over. "I'll be back." She called over her shoulder as she strode out the door. Everyone watched her on the screen that showed the diner while she disappeared out of the TARDIS.

As they all waited, Clara gathered enough courage to talk to Bram again. "If you just wanted to kidnap me, and you were sure that Ashildr would follow along, why wait so long to do it?" She moved closer to him in challenge, her hands still tied behind her back. "Ashildr is one of the most powerful creatures in the universe- you'd think I'd propose an alliance to her without some leverage?" So Ash hadn't planned this all along. (At least the part where Bram is involved.)

Just as Clara was going to respond to Bram with something harsh, a change in the screen caught her attention. The diner had become dark. The lights hadn't been on in the first place, but the large windows brightened the room with the light from the outside wearhouse. Everyone else in the room had noticed as well, and the woman who'd tried to calm Bram down before opened the control room door. "What the hell?" Came Bram's aggravated voice.

He stalked out of the TARDIS, and everyone else followed behind. The space they'd been in only minutes before was now very dark. Someone had taken a page from her book and killed the lights. They were all out of the ship, Clara reilized. She could've just left right then if Ash had not expressed there was something wrong with the ship. Also, Clara was reluctant to leave her friend behind despite all she'd seen.

"Who turned out the lights?" "What happened?" "Hello?" "Help!" People were speaking loudly to one another and there were things crashing as people struggled to see in the darkness. It came back to her that Ashildr had the sunglasses. She at least could see in the dark. That thought lead Clara to her next conclusion. If Ash could see everyone and no one else could, she could come to Clara without anyone knowing. That would be her test for Ash- she'd wait to see if her friend would use this as a chase to explain herself to Clara.

Before Bram could notice she was gone she slipped into the darkness away from her TARDIS. With fear making her feat light, Clara found a wall and walked quickly along it. Of course she didn't know where she was headed, but she knew that should get as far away as possible before someone figured out how to turn the lights back on. If Ashildr was going to follow her, she could catch up since she could see while Clara could not. Somehow Clara managed to bump into only a few things before she turned a corner that she hoped lead out of the room.

' _Ash! Did you turn off the lights?'_ Clara couldn't stop herself from reaching out to her once again. Still, she heard nothing but the people around her. By now Bram would have known she'd gone, and people would be looking for her. Clara just kept putting one foot in front of another as she marched on into the blackness ahead of her.

Behind her someone screamed loud and terrified. When she instinctively looked behind her, Clara was surprised to see something. In the middle of the nothingness before her grew a flame like the orange leaves of fall. It lapped at the ground around it casting rays of light that reviled people scurrying away. Her eyes widened at how fast the fire rose.

Just as Clara smelled smoke a fire alarm sounded and red lights began to flash above her. Almost like blinking, the lights would come on and off many times a second. It was still better than blackness, and now she had an idea of where to go for now dozens of people were brushing past her to escape. Voices shouted and footsteps poured all around her and Clara was swept up in the stampede of people.

Where had a _fire_ come from? Clara was torn between running away from the immediate danger and looping back to her ship to get away. She didn't know if she could risk running into the danger, getting to the ship, and finding it to not fly.

Her mind was made up when she heard Bram's voice shout her name. "She's right there! Get her!" She saw him in the crowd. Bram stood there looking furious and crazy, lit by only the flashing between red and blackness. Clara found a turn off from the main hallway everyone was running down and she bolted away from them. It was a left turn toward the way she'd come.

No one seemed to follow her, she must have been quick enough. Nevertheless, Clara kept running. A few minutes later the alarm stopped. The lights still flashed, but at least she could hear what was happening around her (which appeared to be not much.) The only footsteps she could hear now where her own in the hot, smokey bunker.

Something came crashing down from above her and she had to leap out of it's way. Looking up Clara saw that the great wooden beams in the ceiling were burning and falling down in some parts. She'd have to get out quickly if she didn't want to be squashed or burt or captured. A big part of her wanted to believe this wasn't happening at all. That she was safe, in her TARDIS, with Ashildr (like it should be.) But she wasn't safe- she was stuck in a random collapsing room alone, and though she wouldn't have ever admitted it aloud, she was very frightened. Another piece of rubble fell with a loud clang that made her jump and spin around to face it.

When the dust around it cleared just a little, Clara could see that someone was standing about thirty feet away from her. As they walked closer, she saw that it was Ashildr. Ashildr, with her blood-stained top and unreadable expression, slowly made her way to Clara.

For a split-second, she thought she should just run. Maybe it was the excitement from the crazy day, or maybe it was that she really had believed Ash's performance earlier. There was no reason Clara could think of for Ash to not respond to her (rather pathetic) pleading for an explanation. Approaching her with something oddly predatory in her eyes, the immortal didn't say anything- which only added to Clara's doubt. She was frozen under Ash's intense stare, unable to run even if she'd decided she wanted too. When Ashildr had almost reached her, Clara opened her mouth to say something. She didn't know what she could posible say to Ash, she just knew that one of them had to speak first. Before she could say a word however, Ash got to her and closed Clara's lips with her own.

After only a moment of being startled, Clara melted into the kiss. Her fears of Ashildr betraying her vanished along with any ability to form a coherent thought. Ash pulled Clara into a reassuring embrace, her hands sliding tentatively up her lower back.

They'd never done this before, but Clara decided immediately that she didn't mind at all. She wrapped her arms around Ash's neck and leaned into her. Flames around them roared up like dragon's tongues, and the crumbling structures sounded like an avalanche was coming down around them. Even so, to Clara, everything was alright. Ash was there with her, and she had been lying to Bram all along.

Well, everything except for the fact that the two of them were about to be crushed by collapsing rubble. A larger piece of the ceiling came down and the two both broke off the kiss simultaneously to turn their heads to the falling metal. Nether or them moved their hands, however. Clara had just gotten Ash back and she was very reluctant to let go of her now.

"Clara, I'm so sorry. I couldn't talk to you! I couldn't speak with the telepathic connection because Bram would have heard us. He somehow used his own telekinesis combined with the TARDS's to hack our communication line. I needed him to believe I was on his side- I'm sorry." Ash spoke at a mile a minute with such a desperate, worried look on her face that Clara thought she might start to cry. Hearing it, her explanation made perfect sense, though it was crazy that Bram could listen in on their conversations.

"It's ok, it's ok." Clara wanted to hear more about Ash's side of this adventure, but they needed to get out of there right-the-heck-yesterday. "We need to get back to the TARDIS." Ash concluded.


	11. CH 10: How Long in Eventually?

_**Here we are with chapter ten! Happy late holidays and happy new year! Long story short, this chapter is all from Ashildr's perspective because I looked up and had written 2,500 words. The next chapter will have more of Clara's perspective (if not it being ALL her perspective.) Anyway, sorry this one is late, a combination of transferring my files to my new laptop and being sick made the process slow. I hope you like it!**_

* * *

 **Chapter 10 - How long In eventually?**

Ashildr stepped out of the TARDIS into the yellow grass on the rolling hills before her. The air was warm and it smelled like sweet summertime flowers. She breathed it in for a moment before closing the door behind her and starting to walk towards the beach.

It had been two days since they had been captured and Ashildr had killed Bram. Explaining that part to Clara had been a little difficult. (Ash would have kept that detail of her explanation to herself, but Clara had asked about the blood on her clothes and she hadn't wanted to lie.) She hadn't actually meant to kill him, it was just that when he found her to have betrayed him Bram had responded poorly and, well, 'fallen on a sharp piece of glass.' Even though his death hadn't been intentional Ash didn't mourn the loss of their creepy friend one bit.

Clara had had other questions as well and they'd spent a lot of the next day talking about what had happened. Both Ashildr and her had agreed that part of them had known Bram was up to something the whole while he was with them, though at the time nether could put a finger on it.

Looking up from her thoughts to enjoy the sunlight, she saw Clara come running from the beach. She was holding her flip-flops in one hand as she charged barefoot towards the TARDIS. It was the way she ran in such a B-line that made Ash think she was getting away from danger. She saw the moment Clara saw her because she changed her path a little to meet the other immortal.

Before Clara could run past her and collide with the TARDIS, Ash caught her around the waist. She had been running so fast that they nearly both fell over from her momentum. "Hello to you too. What's on the beach?" Ash said once they'd regained their balance. She let go of Clara. "How do you know there is something on the beach?" Clara said, surprised.

"Because, you were running wildly like you have something important to tell me. If something was chasing you, we'd keep running, but we're not. If you could explain it easily you would have told me telepathically, but you came to get me. If it's something not-dangerous you wouldn't look so excited, so tell me, what's on the beach?" Ash spoke quickly and with hand gestures, both of which were unlike her. Clara's lips crept into a smile at Ashildr's cleverness, and briefly she glanced down to Ash's mouth.

Then she just shook her head and her hands to snap herself out of it. "You're the best." She said to Ash, dismissing whatever thought she was having. "Yes, there is something on the beach. A great, big, terrorizing-people style something." "Sounds not fun." Ash agreed. Clara nodded quickly. "Yeah, and there were people there too. I told them to come with me but they just ran down the beach toward the town. No one is in danger now I don't think- everyone got away. The monster is just smashing up beach umbrellas and sand castles."

"And?" Ash said with a raised eyebrow, knowing Clara had more to say. "And I need the sonic, which you have, so that I can sort out this techy, flashing, thing…" she was clearly having a hard time describing what she was picturing. _'Show me.'_ Ashildr closed her eyes and tried to explain to Clara how to share images and impressions. It didn't work until Clara reached out her hand and grasped Ashildr's. Then suddenly Ash could see exactly what Clara had seen on the beach.

Some sort of bit of technology was stuck to the back of a creature the size of a pick-up-truck with chains. The device was silver, and all boxy, and it had a few flashing lights on the side. The monster looked like a wingless bat that walked on four legs. Ashildr must have gotten the bat reference from Clara as well, because she would've never made a connection like that on her own.

She opened her eyes quickly and looked at Clara with warning. "You are not going to climb onto the back of that beast!" Clara glanced past Ash nervously though she couldn't actually see the beach from where they were. "Why not?" She challenged. "Because, I can do it better." Ash smirked and grabbed the sonic glasses from her pocket waving them in front of Clara's face teasingly.

When Clara made an offended noise and swiped for the sunglasses Ash smiled and took off running. Clara followed right behind, but Ash was much faster and she was able to get a ahead of her. They ran through the tall grass until Clara caught up to her at the top of the hill before the beach. It was surprisingly windy and Ashildr was glad she had put up her hair. Clara hadn't, though, and she tried (and failed) to keep her hair out of her face with her hands.

Ash spotted the monster just below them and she dropped to the ground to stay hidden by the hill, dragging Clara with her. They lay on their stomachs peering over the crest of the mound at the beach below. "That was rude!" Clara complained quietly. Ash kept her eyes focused on the bat-creature. "Yes, it was, wasn't it? So rude of me to make sure you don't get beaten up by a beach-monster." Her tone was flat intentionally though she knew Clara knew not to take her too seriously.

"Ash…" She trailed off. "Mm?" Ash still didn't look over. "What would it take to kill you? You've haven't told me." Clara sounded like her own question made her uncomfortable. Ashildr sighed. "Do we really have to talk about this now?" She tried to be gentle but Clara was distracting them from the task at hand. The beast roared loudly at a beach ball that was rolling away from it. When Clara didn't say anything else Ash stood up and started carefully down the hill. The younger woman followed.

The creature didn't seem to notice them at all. When she was about halfway down the hill, Ash finally looked back at Clara. "I'm going to jump on it's back to scan the thingy. I'm guessing it won't like that, so be ready if it goes crazy." Clara muttered something under her breath about how 'she could jump onto a beast just as well as Ashildr could' while Ash whistled to the beast.

The bat-creature spun around and snarled at her. Only now could she see that is was drenched in seawater as if it had gone for a swim. "Isn't it your job to name all the monsters we encounter? Let me know when you decide on one." Ash said right before jumping off the hill and into the air. She aimed her landing perfectly and ended up square on the back of the creature. She clung onto it by holding fur in both hands. Carefully, Ash put the sunglasses on and scanned the device on the bat's back while it thrashed around wildly trying to shake her off.

A few moments passed and the sonic told her that the device was a tracking beacon. Wearing the glasses Ash could hear a high pitched squeal coming from the tracker. She took them off so the noise would stop. The sound was enough to drive someone insane, Ash thought as she tried to come up with what to do next.

"I think the noise this thing is making is driving it crazy!" Ash raised her voice to reach Clara. "Then turn it off!" She did just that, baring the noise from the device herself in order to sonic the tracker off. It let out a long 'BEEP' and then the flashing lights stopped along with the noise.

Instantly, the creature stopped thrashing around. It was still long enough for Ashildr to slip off of it's back and get far enough out of it's way. Ash was soaking wet from the saltwater in the beast's fur. Clara ran up to her while she tried to dry her hands on the bottom of her shirt. "You made that look easy!" She said, smiling. Ash gave her a proudly raised chin before turning back to the bat. "What now?" The monster was peacefully digging a deep whole in the sad with its claw-like bat thumbs. "Now it looks like a bat who thinks it's a puppy." Clara mused.

"I still don't think it should chill on the beach… you said people were here?" The chains that still held the deactivated device onto the creature's back jingled festively with it's every swipe at the sand. "Yeah, everyone ran back to the houses." Clara pointed down the beach to what looked like a neighbourhood of seaside cottages. "Where did it come from?" They both went back to watching the beast. "The ocean. I was almost on the sand when it came crashing out of the water. You can imagine just how scared the people on the beach were." Ash nodded.

"Well I guess we need to find this puppy's owner now, don't we?" She watched Clara smile at the animal before them. "Yes." She sounded a little distracted. "Did you come up with a name for him?" They would need to figure out what to do with it. "Bartok. Like that cartoon."

"Bartok? I thought you named monsters things like… 'sand devil' or- I don't know, not 'Bartok.'" Clara look at her defensively. "Yes, monsters get monster names, but puppies get pet names. You named Oscar, and I named Bartok." Ashildr sighed in defeat.

About a half an hour later the two were in the control room of the TARDIS examining the monitor. Ashildr had plugged the sunglasses into the mainframe so that the spaceship could look at the data she collected from scanning the tracker and hopefully tell them more about it. They had taken a few minutes to talk to some people who had ran from the beach, and they'd agreed to watch the now harmless creature for a little bit while Clara and Ash found out more about how to get rid of Bartok.

"How long do you think this will take?" Clara groned. "You're bored after like five minutes?" Ash gave her an affectionate expression, turning away from the screen.

"I somehow remember time passing a lot faster when I traveled in the police box TARDIS." She said innocently. Ash looked at her with mock hurt in her eyes. "Am I and our TARDIS not good enough for you?" Clara smiled and put her arms on Ash's shoulders, seemingly happy to distract herself from the boring process of waiting for the TARDIS to give them more info. "Of course not." She leaned forward and kissed Ashildr's smile.

When Ash had found Clara in the fire she'd set in Bram's bunker, she'd been so relieved that she was safe. Without really thinking about what she was doing, she'd kissed her. Clara had reacted a lot better than Ash thought she would, and it was only afterward that Ashildr had had to think about what she'd done.

Clara was dead, she'd been dead for almost all of Ash's life, and even though she was around for now, eventually she'd have to die for real. Ashildr had apparently once been a very caring person. A millions losses and broken hearts later, though, she'd learned to keep people at a distance. As Clara leaned against her, Ashildr knew that she'd made a mistake.

A long, long, time ago she had promised not to get attached. Not to let herself get involved. Still, she couldn't force herself to pull away from Clara. She hadn't realized that being so deprived of contact for so long had made her all the more hungry for it.

Clara was one of two people still alive who'd known her before she was made immortal, the other being The Doctor who she hated. For some reason Clara was able to see right through the wall Ash put up between herself and the rest of the world without any difficulty, and she apparently liked what she saw there. The problem wasn't really that she was beginning to care about someone again- it was that Clara was exactly the wrong person to fall for. How could she become attached to someone who was so perfect, so clever, and beautiful, and impossible, and then be expected to let her go when Clara went to face the raven?

Ashildr was well aware that she couldn't ignore the fact that though Clara was immortal like herself, she still had a day to die just the same as any mortal. It was almost worse that it was up to her when she died, because it meant that it was possible for her to travel with Ashildr for way too long. So long that the Viking might become too attached.

It had become easy to not feel anything toward normal people because they would vanish before she could think too hard about it. But Clara could stick around as long as she wanted to. That's what made the prospect of letting her into Ash's heart so painfully tempting. She would stick around. Ash would have to stop herself from continuing this intimate relationship soon. Yes, soon… but not just yet. Exactly how long is in 'eventually?' she wondered.

The TARDIS screen chimed and Clara let go of Ashildr to look at the newfound information on it. Completely unaware of Ash's train of thought, Clara carried on with their mission to return Bartok to whomever he belonged to. "This shows us a map of where the device tracked Bartok since it was activated."

Scowling at the screen, Ash agreed. "Yeah, and it seems to not have been activated for very long- just from being in the sea," she pointed to the beginning dot of the red line on the map, "and when I turned it off on the beach."

"So he was underwater? Like, the device was activated underwater? Ooo, this is shaping up to be a deep-sea-base adventure!" Clara's eyes sparkled with the idea. "Slow down," Ash turned and rounded the console to change what was on the screen. "this is a scan the TARDIS did of the area, and look, no underwater base."

The two maps side by side almost matched apart from the view slightly and the red line that showed the movements of the bat-creature. "Ok.." Clara seemed a little disappointed. "Could the device have been activated remotely? Maybe whoever put it on Bartok did so before he was in the water, and then activated the device when they were safely away from him?"

"Could be. We can try to follow the signal the device was giving off to see where it was sending this data to." She began to do just that, leaning over the control panel of the TARDIS and typing in directions to figure out the destination the signal was made for. "Great idea. We can sort out what the heck Bartok was doing on the beach, and then get straight back here to get him off of it." Clara watched what she was doing over her shoulder.

"Exactly." Just as she spoke, the TARDIS found the information it needed to follow the signal. "Here we go!" Ash pulled down the main lever and they both held on as the ship shook to take off.


	12. CH 11: Abstract Christmas Tree

_**Chapter 11 everybody! THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A TWO-CHAPTER FILLER BUT CLARA HAD EMOTIONS SO THIS IS BEING DRAGGED OUT MORE BEFORE I CAN DO ALL THE FUN STUFF I HAVE PLANNED. Sorry about that, I'm just annoyed that instead of this chapter being short and sweet it's 3300 words of touchy-feely stuff. I will have to write one more before I start the next adventure. Anyway, Enjoy!**_

* * *

 **Chapter 11 - Abstract Christmas Tree:**

"Are we going to use the lifeform scanner this time? Before we waltz into a completely unknown place with who-knows-what waiting for us?" Clara could hear the tease in Ashildr's tone. Last time they'd landed somewhere they'd known nothing about Clara had been too preoccupied trying to impress Bram that she didn't bother taking precautions, despite Ash's insistence.

"Yes, yes," she sighed. "What does it say?" Ash smiled an amused smile of victory at Clara's exasperated tone as they both looked at the results of the scan done by their TARDIS.

"Wait… I can't be reading that right-" She squinted at the screen. "No, you're right... The TARDIS thinks there are no life forms outside those doors… that makes no sense, this is where the data was being sent from Bartok's tracker, why send data to somewhere no one will see it?" Clara watched Ash double checked that they were in the right place. They were. "Where are we?"

"This is a small space station orbiting the dwarf-planet we were just on." Ash pointed at the screen as a map came up. "Well, it seems habitable, right?" Clara asked, and Ash nodded. The oxygen levels were high enough, and there was a low enough level of pollution, etc. "Then why is no one here?" She continued, straightening to walk to the door.

"You coming?" Clara was holding the door open but Ashildr didn't look up from the console. She waved her hand dismissively in the general direction of where Clara was standing. "Yeah, in a sec." Clara rolled her eyes but Ash wasn't paying enough attention to her to see. "Ok. I'll be adventuring!" Clara left Ashildr to whatever it was she was doing, assuming that there was about zero trouble to get into in an empty base.

She closed the door of the control room, patting Oscar on the head as she strode through the diner and then out the main door. The corridor they'd landed was barely big enough for the diner to sit in, the low ceilings almost brushed the roof of the diner and the walls were tight on its sides. Clara noted with fondness that The Doctor's blue box _never_ had trouble fitting places.

The base itself was quite dark, with only little yellow lights lining the floor, like those lights that go down the aisles of planes. Her flip-flops (which she was still wearing from her attempt to visit the beach below) slapping the floor with every footstep was the only sound around her, and she was the only thing moving in the otherwise literally lifeless base.

It seemed every time that she tried to take a day off from monsters and evil villains, something would interrupt her relaxation by trying to blow up a planet, or kidnap a city, or who knows what else. Clara guessed that now she knew what it was really like to be The Doctor. The only difference was that he _always_ loved danger. Clara, just like any other school teacher she knew, liked a break now and again. She'd been excited to find a beach on a distant planet- cuffing her jeans halfway up her calves and wearing flip-flops in preparation to walk in the sea water.

But, of course, even though Bartok was an unexpected interruption to her beach plans, he wasn't altogether an unwanted one. It was good to keep busy in this, the long way round', she'd discovered. Solving mysteries and chasing unknown dangers was right up her alley, after all.

"Hello?" she called. No response (of course.) she started up the hallway toward a window. Looking out of it, she could see the yellow planet below. It was a lot smaller than earth, and it appeared to be golden and blue, rather than the green and blue of her home. Gazing at a planet that was so distant from her own, Clara suddenly felt a pang of homesickness.

Sure, she'd been to countless other worlds with The Doctor, and now she and Ashildr we're traveling the universe too, but she was starting to miss her home a little more everyday she spent in the diner-TARDIS. Her heart ached to think about what she'd left behind when she'd agreed to _try_ to face the raven. Her father, her Nan… all her students at Coal Hill school.

Rigsy And Ashildr had told all of them she'd died, and they hadn't been wrong. When Danny had died, there had been a ceremony at the school in his honor which all the students and staff attended. Clara remembered that at that assembly she had been so focused on figuring out how to bring him back, so angry that he'd been taken from her, that she had barely been paying attention. Now, she wondered if there was a ceremony held for her, too.

A tiny beeping noise from behind her startled Clara out of her daze, and when she turned to look at the source of the sound, she realized that her eyes were full of tears. She wiped them away quickly and crouched to the tiny blinking green light on the ground.

Before her was a golf ball sized metal mouse. It took a timid step back from her as she examined it from a safe distance. "It's ok, I'm not going to hurt you."

The little robot beeped at her and shuffled closer. "Hi! I'm Clara. Who are you?" A different beep came from a little further down the hallway, and she saw that there was another tiny little mouse scurrying toward her. It's light, which flashed when it beeped, was orange instead of green. When the two robots were next to each other, she reached out her hand to them, fascinated at the little creatures.

A third one, this one carrying a pink light, came out of a crack in the baseboard, and ran up to sit near her foot. The green mouse jumped into her hand as she offered, and she held it up to her face when she stood. Two more appeared, each beeping to one another creating a colourful display of lights all before her. They were impossibly cute, Clara observed as more and more filled the hallway until what must have been a hundred were beeping and flashing at her feet.

She'd never seen anything quite like it. That's how things went when you traveled the universe, she supposed, you'd meet bird boy princes and little beeping mice. The one she was holding looked over the edge her hand made to see it's kin on the floor. It flashed at its fellow mice, and for the first time since spotting them, Clara realized how quickly she'd become outnumbered.

She bent to put the green mouse down, but it clung to her wrist with it's little sharp claws and ran up her arm to her shoulders before she could shake it off. A blue mouse started to scurry up her leg, and when she tried to brush it off, she saw another that was already up to her hip. She chuckled a little at their determination to climb her, though she still tried to get them off.

Before she knew it, there were more and more mice coming from all directions. All squeaking and blinking as they ran up her jeans. She twisted to brush one off of her shoulder blade, and saw that there were half a dozen on her arm. Clara stepped back, but they kept running towards her and up her body. Looking down, she saw that the mice blinking colourful lights all over her made her look like an abstract Christmas tree.

She stumbled again as one jumped from her shoulder to the top of her head. "Get off!" She shouted, thrashing her arms in an attempt to shake them. Panic began to slip into her mind as the now _hundreds_ of tiny robots climbed her. They weren't really hurting her, apart from that their little claws were quite sharp, but there were so many on her by now that she was having trouble keeping her balance.

"What the... I left you alone for _five minutes_!" Clara looked up to see Ash standing in the open doorway of the diner staring at her in disbelief. "How did you even-"

"Just help me get them off!" Clara cut her off with a frustrated groan. Ash ran up to her, mice scurrying out of the way of her feet as she did so. She grabbed a mouse off Clara's shoulder, only for one to start to climb _her_ pant leg as well. "Gross! What are they?" She said with a laugh.

In her haste, Ashildr had left the door to the TARDIS open. They both looked back to it when they heard the growl of their feline friend coming from the diner. Oscar ran after Ashildr, and like a cartoon, as soon as a mouse saw him it would disappear back to where it came. "Good boy!" Clara called to the ginger tabby. All the mice on Clara climbed as high away from the cat as they could, some of them falling to the ground as they all fought for space on her shoulders.

When the mice using Clara as a lifeboat were the only ones left, Ashildr held Oscar up to them, and one by one they were frightened into jumping ship. Once they were all off her, Ash held the cat to her chest and praised him with pets. The cat purred loudly around a mouse that he held between his teeth. The little robot beeped foul language, struggled, and flashed it's pink light at him.

"Hey, put that down. You don't know where it's been!" Clara pried the robot from his mouth with a disgusted huff, and then threw it to the ground where it then scurried away. Oscar didn't seem to mind her taking away his toy because he looked perfectly happy to rub his face all over Ashildr's.

"Saved by the cat… what will we get ourselves into next?" Ash commented, pushing his head away from her gently. They both broke out into giggles, hugging Oscar and petting him in gratitude.

When the laughter finally subsided, and Oscar struggled out of Ashildr's arms to sniff at the floorboards where the mice had gone, Clara refocused on their actual mission. "What took you so long in the TARDIS? Not that I found anything but colourful, flashing, mice out here. Any idea as to what we do next?"

Clara saw the affectionate smile Ash gave her when she said "Clara Oswald, do you even _know how_ to take a break? It's like you were born to save the universe." Ash of course didn't know the how close to the truth what she said actually was, Clara thought.

Her tease must have been rhetorical, because she didn't pause long enough for Clara to respond. "Anyway, I was following a hunch. I think I know what this place is, but I'm not sure. As soon as the TARDIS showed that there are no other lifeforms here, I had sudden déjà vu. I mean, I'm basically always experiencing déjà vu from one thing or another, but I thought I'd snoop around some more with the station's signals, and I actually found something useful." She paused to put the sonic sunglasses on Clara's face.

"Look, there is this message hidden in all signals sent out from the base. I guess it's a copyright or inspection certificate or something, but it goes in-depth on what this place is." Clara read the words that scrolled slowly on the little screen formed by wearing the sunglasses.

The message explained in very fancy terminology that the base was left un-populated because it is located too far away from the planet below to make regular supply trips back and forth. It claimed that the automated systems on the station could run it without 'organic components.' Ash continued to talk at her, spilling out all the information she'd found while Clara had been wandering throughout the base.

"The message also told me what this place is. It's called a Wildlife Tracking Hub. Apparently it's made to learn about the natural habits of certain endangered species. Things like tracking their movements."

"Okay, so we know what the base is, but why would a place that's primary purpose is to learn about wildlife give Bartok a tracker that drove him crazy?" She took off the sunglasses after finishing the last line of text. Ashildr shrugged.

"Guess it must have been an error? I was also thinking that it was strange that the locals didn't recognize his species, though he was clearly a water _and_ land creature. They'd only track native animals I'm guessing, so why didn't anyone know what he was?" Ash commented. "Yeah… that _is_ strange." Clara agreed, crossing her arms in thought.

"Also, if there are no crew that work for this place than who put the tracker on him in the first place? It makes sense that the base's systems could have activated it remotely to begin collecting data, but it couldn't possibly have actually put the device on him, especially since he was _underwater._ " She continued in a roundabout train of thought as Ash watched her with something Clara couldn't quite place in her eyes.

"I don't know.." Ashildr replied. "How far did you explore the station? We should go look at the controls to see if there is a log of the actions the system has done. Maybe that would tell us more about Bartok."

Clara nodded at her words and they set off down the hallway. Oscar followed, trotting beside Ashildr's heels. They past the window Clara had been looking out of. She failed to stop herself from glancing back down to the planet below and being reminded of what she'd been thinking about before being interrupted by a tiny robot mouse. Her mind wandered helplessly back to earth, and her father, and Danny…

"Clara!" Ashildr grabbed her hand and tugged her arm suddenly to stop her in her tracks. "Y-yeah? what?" Ash looked like she was worried about her. "You just about crossed this tripwire." She bent to point the silver line out to Clara. She _had_ almost tripped on the wire. How could she have missed it?

"Clara are you okay? You seem…" Ash asked, causing Clara to smile quickly to reassure her. ' _I'm good. Sorry.'_ She knew that Ash would believe her more if she were to speak to her mind-to-mind, and it seemed to work. ' _I'm good.'_

* * *

"Why would there be booby traps in an empty station?" Clara asked when they were in the station's control center. "'Booby traps?'" Ash asked, only half paying attention as she tried to figure out the digital display of the systems on the base. "The trip-wire. Stuff like that is called 'booby traps.'" Ashildr looked up for a moment to give her an expression of 'what a ridiculous name.' "Silly name, I know. It basically is describing trip-wires and hidden pits with spikes things that only a fool would fall for. The term comes from the 1500s." When Ash widened her eyes even further at Clara's crazy knowledge of English sayings, she explained "What? I _am_ a teacher." Clara defended.

"You are an English teacher, not a history teacher." She pointed out, going back to trying to unlock the screen on the large glass table before her. "Okay, It's a trivial pursuit question… long story. Anyway, you even lived in the 1500s, let alone in the time of Indiana Jones movies, how come you don't know what a booby trap is?" after some trial and error, Ash got to the main file explorer to look for information about Bartok. If she could just figure out which of the hundreds of files to look through, then an explanation wouldn't be hard to find. "I do know, I just forgot." She knew how to brush the holes in her knowledge of the world off easily by now.

Scrolling through the long list, she saw a folder called 'species log.' "This looks helpful." Ash said, trying half-heartedly to engage though it was clear that Clara was lost in her own world right then. "Do you think that this place is important enough for the owners to worry about break-ins? Who breaks into a space station anyway?" The taller woman was apparently still on the topic of space station security. "Um, Us?" Ash replied.

"Yeah, guess so." Clara's voice was small and distracted making Ash pause what she was doing and look up. The brunette was gazing through a window to outer space with a very calm expression on her face. "Clara." Ashildr abandoned her spot at the screen to take a step toward her hesitantly. She didn't even realize she'd decided to move at all until she was standing next to the other woman.

Neither of them said anything more for a moment as they looked over the stars and the two small moons belonging to the yellow planet below. Clara was so still that she could have been a statue. Then came her quite whisper "I don't need to breathe… I could just stand here forever not doing anything at all but looking into space."

"Yeah. Yeah, you could. I don't think that would be very fun though, and knowing you, I think you'd probably get restless and give up before long." Ash was trying to help by staying light hearted but Clara barley seemed to notice that she said anything.

"Once I had to hold my breath in order to survive these rubbish robots from the dawn of time. I'd thought The Doctor had abandoned me and I needed to hold my breath to stay alive." She still wasn't looking at Ash, and her words were quick like she wanted to get them all out and be rid of them. "He… he was supposed to have my back. To have my back when I couldn't hold my breath any longer. Now I don't need to breathe, and he is gone. I wasn't born to save the universe, I was born to save The Doctor, and now I just…"

Ashildr would have said something to offer some kind of support but she couldn't think of what would help. Clara continued

"I miss him. I miss my mother, and my father, and The Doctor, and…" ' _Danny. You miss Danny.'_ Ash finished silently, careful _not_ to let Clara hear.

She blinked away the tears that Ash saw were in her eyes and looked down a little nervously. "I shouldn't be complaining about this to _you_ of all people. You've lived forever and have lost so much more than I have." Clara said with an unconvincing chuckle.

"No, Clara, don't do that. There is no need to belittle your own pain. Maybe I have lost a lot, but I can hardly remember most of it anyway. And that's just why you _can_ tell me, at least I _know_." This time when Ashildr tried to catch her eye, she managed to, and she held Clara's tear-filled gaze with her own reassuring one to try to convince her that she meant what she said.

Clara hugged her from almost a foot away, wrapping her arms around Ash's neck and resting her chin on her shoulder. After a tiny moment of hesitation Ashildr pulled her closer by the waist in an attempt to be the comfort that she very clearly needed.

They had both seemed to forget about the pressing matter of Bartok on the planet below until Clara eventually pulled back a little to look at her once again. "I think we've probably wasted enough time…" Ash sighed though she nodded in reluctant agreement. "Yes, we have."


	13. CH 12: Specimen 004568

**_First off I wanted to start with something other than an apology. I wanted to thank anyone who has stumbled across my story and taken the time to read my horrible writing. Also, I really appreciate all the lovely comments from my loyal fans of this fic, you know who you are and thanks a ton!_** ** _This story is still going, I have at least the next ten chapters planned out with loads of adventure, flirting, and laughing at authority figures. (So basically everyday life for Clara and Ashildr.)_**  
 ** _I may not be able to post every week as I had been, but I am very committed to this story and I want to put in the time to get it right Not abandoning this yet!_**

 ** _Oof this is all Clara's perspective... Maybe that's why it was hard to write, I'm used to switching! oh well._**

 _ **Though this isn't my favorite chapter, it was pretty fun! Enjoy.**_

* * *

 **Chapter 12 - Specimen** **004568:**

"Why does it feel like we aren't getting anywhere?" Clara asked half-heartedly as they walked through the base. In each of their arms were bundles of thick cable that they were trailing through the space station from the TARDIS. "Once we hook the console up to the main systems of the station I will be able to figure out what's going on. ...I hope."

Throwing a long part of the cord behind her to give her more slack to keep walking forward with the bundle, Clara said "it's a good thing we have a time machine and can get back to Bartok soon enough- I wouldn't want to leave him with strangers for too long." Ashildr seemed to be distracted with Oscar trying to chase the moving cable on the ground, but she kept up the conversation alright.

"Me either. At least someone is watching him and he's not crazy anymore." They turned the corner to the control room of the ship and Ash stopped and held up her hand for Clara to do the same. "Tripwire. Remember? Here." She put her length of cable on the ground and slid it carefully under the wire. Then she took Clara's and did the same. They both stepped over the line and picked up their bundles on the other side. Oscar trotted over it with barely a change in his gate.

In the control room Clara held the wire while Ashildr screwed one end of it into a port underneath the glass table. When she was finished, she gestured for Clara to drop the tangle of wire she held so that they could go back to the TARDIS. She did, and the cord fell to the ground with a thump. "It'll be so much easier to figure out what's going on with a familiar interface." They started back to the TARDIS.

"I've decided that saving the day is less interesting after the danger is over." Clara said matter-of-factly. "Most people would disagree with that…" Ash commented. Clara stayed silent for a while after that. They stepped over the tripwire in perfect unison. "Most people haven't traveled with The Doctor."

Ash nodded at her words as they walked. "You are one of the children of time. You don't do normal anymore." Clara glanced at her quizzically. "'Children of time?" She asked.

"That's what The Doctor's companions are called, don't you know? That's what the Daleks started calling all the humans he effected and a lot of other caught on." Ash rattled off the story as they walked with seemingly no trouble of remembering it. "The Doctor's friends are woven throughout history just as he is." Ashildr explained, opening the door to the diner.

"Most timelords _like_ humans, but he has always made friends with mortals. You are the impossible girl, you've changed the universe to." The cable attached to the station trailed through the diner. Ashildr went straight to looking at the screen when they got to the control room.

"Someone's got to sort out fair play, and someone else has to help them." Clara replied nonchalantly. "Now we don't need a timelord at all to save the day!" Ashildr commented. It was true, but that notion sounded very odd to Clara.

It was still so strange to her that she was alive. Clara hadn't realized how much that freaked her out until she'd slowed down and stayed still for a moment. On Trap street she had been brave, but that was mostly because she A, wasn't thinking straight, and B, wasn't scared of dying. Now, though, she had time to think about what it would mean to go back to Galifrey and then to her own timestream.

The impossible girl had died many times before, of course. She'd lived the lives and died the deaths of every Clara Oswald copy, even though her memory of each of their journeys were individually hard to recall. Maybe that was why she hadn't been scared to face the raven. ' _I'm still not scared. I'll go back to Trap street, and it'll be fine. We all face the raven in the end, that is the deal.'_ Ash spun around slowly to give her a questioning look.

Clara hadn't realized she was sharing that with Ash until the shorter woman stopped and stared at her with a completely blank expression. "I'm sorry- I-I didn't mean to…" she fumbled to make an excuse but came up blank. Ashildr blinked at her quizzically and Clara immediately regretted her own clumsiness.

One of the last things Clara had done before the countdown on the back of her neck struck zero was make an effort to protect Ashildr from The Doctor. He had been so mad at her, blaming her for Clara's stupid choice to take the cronolock. Clara had asked him, the only way she could, to forgive Ash (or at least leave her alone.) 'There will be no revenge.' When they had found Me at the end of the universe Clara at least knew that her Doctor had obeyed her last wish and spared the immortal.

Clara didn't even think Ashildr knew what she'd done. No one but herself and The Doctor would have been able to understand the meaning in the words she had said to him. Not Rigsy, and not Ash.

When Danny died he'd made a promise. When Clara died, she'd given an order. After his death The Doctor saved Clara's soul from killing Missy. Before Clara had faced the raven she had saved The Doctor's soul from killing Ashildr. It was a cycle of painful parallels that taunted her endlessly.

'You will not insult my memory.' Even her own words taunted her. Now that she thought about it, she guessed that she had insulted her own memory by taking it away from The Doctor.

' _You don't have to tell me, but if you want too, you can.'_ Ashildr's soothing voice slid in and out of her head, pushing aside all the painful times she was remembering. Clara acknowledged that the two of them must have stood there not saying anything for a few minutes. "I just…" she began to speak quietly as she looked into Ash's eyes.

Something about the sincerity in Ashildr's gaze made Clara unable to look away. The depths of the eyes of the woman who had seen it all were like endless galaxies swirling with the weight of all she'd done. Yet, they were still kind. After all Ashildr had witnessed, and all the ice walls she put up to protect herself from the universe and the universe from _her_ , she was able to look at Clara with _kindness._ That was what was so fascinating to Clara. How did she stay herself even after all this? Heck, maybe Ash could teach Clara, goodness knows she would need it if she was serious about taking the long way round'.

Making Clara jump, a loud video call announced it's presence by showing the incoming information on the screen. Ash hurried to see where it was coming from. "Who would call the TARDIS?" Clara asked, following her to the controls, taking a deep breath to steady herself and refocus . "I… I don't know. Answer it!" Ashildr said, and Clara did, standing on her tiptoes to press 'Answer' on the touch screen.

"Hello?" A man's face appeared on the screen looking down at them. "Who is this? How do you have this number?" Ashildr questioned a little over-hostilely. Clara briefly touched her arm as a signal to back down. "I… uh… I don't have any number, this line hacked the company station and I followed it to contact you. I'm Dave, I just work at the desk- I can get the boss, I didn't think I'd get through to anyone, sorry." 'Dave' looked human, and fumbled with the device he was calling on making the video shake just as Clara would expect any old man like him to.

"Please do. Where are you calling from, Dave?" Clara inquired as Ash went back to fiddling with the TARDIS controls and looking at the changing information on the part of the screen that wasn't occupied by the video chat. "From Yero. Ya' know, H.Q." Clara looked over her shoulder at Ash with a raised eyebrow and she quietly explained. "Uh, I think 'Yero' is an Island on the planet below." Clara nodded.

It felt silly to be trying to communicate with someone over what was essentially alien FaceTime. "That's right, we are located on the north side of the planet in the rexzo ocean." Clara smiled when Ashildr shrugged a 'no idea where that is, but ok.' Dave had been carrying his end of the call through 'HQ,' and he pointed the camera at the ceiling when he started to talk to someone Clara assumed was 'Boss.' "You asked me to figure out the bug coming from station 2B? Well, turns out it _not_ a bug, and there actually were intruders on the station." The way he said 'intruders' was so friendly and calm that it sounded like Clara and Ash had been invited to the station.

"What? On the station?" Asked a woman's high pitched voice. "Yes. I attempted contact, and I actually have them on the line here." Clara glanced behind her to see the amused expression Ash was looking at the screen with. "Well, give that to me!" Said the woman. The camera jerked and spun around once and then they could see both Dave and the source of the other voice. The woman was short, and older looking. Her red lipstick and formal pants-suit made her look very authoritative all the same.

"Hello, This is Ava Walker, director of operations at Grantege Wildlife Research Facilities." Clara thought that this lady was awfully calm talking to intruders on her base. "...Who are you? What are you doing on 2B?" Before Clara could come up with a reasonable explanation to their complicated mission in only a few sentences, Ash did just that.

"Hi, I'm Ashildr, and this is Clara. We were on-planet and came across a violent creature that had been driven mad by the tracking device on it's back. When I turned the device off, we were left with a big, harmless animal that doesn't belong on the beach. So, we tracked the signal here, and have been trying to figure out what's going on so we can return the animal to where it belongs."

"One of the creatures with our tracking devices went savage? How could that be?" Ava asked, seeming genuinely concerned. Clara decided that she liked this woman after only the few moments they'd been speaking for, she seemed to care about her job and was polite even when faced with a challenge.

"The noise coming from the tracker was hurting his head. I could hear the high-pitched frequency too when I was wearing our sonic scanning device, and let me tell you I don't blame the creature." Ash replied. " _Bartok."_ Clara corrected. Ava rose an eyebrow. "Clara named him Bartok." Ashildr explained to Ava and Dave, half amused. The director just shrugged.

"You did a scan of the device? Do you still have that scan? If so, I can match it to our database, find which animal it was, and check the specimen report log to see what the latest status update on him was." The Camera view on HQ's end moved again when Dave brought the communication device closer to them to show them Ava's computer screen.

"Yes, I do. I will send it to you now." Ashildr took the sunglasses from her jacket pocket and stuck them in the TARDIS console port. Then she typed some quick and complicated commands I It the keys, and the classic 'swoosh' noise of an e-mail being sent chimed from the controls.

Ava turned to her own screen, squinted at it, and started typing away as well. "You are a rehabilitation center, correct?" Clara asked Dave as Ava worked with the data. "Among other things, yeah. We heal wildlife from all over the planet and if they are well enough to survive the wild once again afterwards we set em' free." The way he spoke about his work with such pride made Clara feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

"Got it. I don't have the most recent status report from the station because you interfered with the data for this file, but I know what was updated as of yesterday. Bartok is Specimen 004568, he's a Mega Chiroptera, three years old and just released back into his natural habitat two days ago after we healed his broken leg." Ava listed all the details of his file while Clara watched Ash not pay any attention to the director.

"Ok, so what was wrong with the scanner? And why did no one around recognize him if he was in his natural habitat?" Clara wondered aloud.

"I'm not sure… we run a very big operation here these days and I can't oversee every release as I used to." She said a little sadly. "Another thing, what's with the tracker only being activated for only about twenty minutes? The scan I did of the tracker showed only his movements from the past few minutes before we saw him on the beach." Ashildr added.

Ava looked at her quizzically. "Only a few minutes? Show me." Ash nodded and turned back to the controls. She sent the map that they'd seen before to Ava's computer. "This… can't be right! What map is this?" Clara was confused at Ava's confusion. "What do you mean?" She asked.

"This is the map that our ship made of the area we found Bartok in. Is it in an unfamiliar format for you?" Ash explained, glancing between her own view of the map, Ava on the screen, and Clara beside her. "No, I mean the map makes sense, it's just the wrong area to where it says Bartok was released. This is…" she trailed off for a moment, her fingers clicking furiously on her keyboard and then silencing when she found what she was looking for.

"This is completely the wrong location. 004568 was supposed to be released in his natural habitat, The mountains of Ornaya, which is relatively near HQ actually. This map is of Selly cove, yes? Cute little town with lots of colours and tall yellow grass almost all the way up to the ocean?" Ashildr nodded, but Clara was a little lost.

' _They released him in the wrong place. I don't know what that means about what will happen next, but at least we know what's already happened.'_ When the two immortals spoke mind-to-mind they shared more than simple words. Impressions and concepts as well as whole understandings always slipped through between each message even when they didn't mean to.

Clara guessed that was why whenever Ash wanted to explain something to her she would do if telepathically. It was also quicker. When she explained about Bartok just then she had expressed how she was feeling about the situation, what some of her budding ideas for solving it were, as well as her judgments of the two new people they'd be working with to solve it. Ash liked Ava too, but thought that Dave wouldn't be extremely helpful.

Clara blinked to clear her head and re-focus on the person talking with actual words, but she also nodded subtlety at Ash's words. "So you're saying Bartok is in the wrong place?" With a very shameful look on her face Ava answered. "...completely the wrong side of the planet."


	14. CH 13: Fly Home

_**Nice long one! This chapter was super fun and the next one is almost ready too. I have given up on one a week, but I will try to post as frequently as possible.**_

* * *

 **Chapter 13 - Fly Home:**

"Ok, so you were right. He doesn't drink blood." Ash stood at the top of the hill before the beach on the planet below once again. In her arms was a huge watermelon, and slung over her shoulder was a machete.

"Some bats drink blood, but most of them eat bugs and fruit." She continued when Clara stared at her with both eyebrows raised. The younger immortal was already playing in the sand with Bartok.

Ashildr had stayed behind in the TARDIS upon arriving back on the surface of the planet to look through her journals to see if she'd ever encountered a creature like Bartok before. She had (of course,) and she had even written a helpful species report as she often did with interesting creatures.

Diary two was the one with all the catalogs, and it told her that Bartok would be easy to control if she had fruit. It also told her that yes, he could breathe underwater as well as fly with his bat wings- quite a remarkable creature, really.

"What's with the big scary knife?" Clara asked, standing and brushing sand off her light navy jeans. Bartok rolled on his back beside her, entertained with the last un-burst beach ball left around. "To cut the watermelon." Ashildr said with a grin. She put the green melon on the grass and nudged it with her foot a little. It rolled down the hill almost merrily, and bumped into Clara's feet on the sand.

"You know that's not what machetes are made for, right?" Clara said skeptically. "Okay, _mom."_ Ash teased, coming down the hill towards her friend and the beast. "Everyone is easier to control once they've eaten, and we are going to need his full cooperation if we want to get him anywhere." She explained, slicing the fruit once down the middle, and again, and again, until there were six even wedges of sticky pink melon.

Then, she cut off a smaller slice and gave it to Clara. "Why thank you." Ash smiled at her a little briefly before standing with all the rest of the watermelon in her arms, and whistling loudly to Bartok.

He rolled onto his stomach to peer at her, and when his eyes lit up at the sight of the snack she'd brought him, Ashildr flung a wedge at him. He snached it out of the air and crunched if between his teeth, translucent, pink juice trickling out the side of his mouth.

Clara laughed at him as Ash tossed the rest, one after another, until he had devoured the whole thing. The bat then just sat up and tilted his head at the two hoping for even more food.

Just then, Ava came in on the earpiece that Ashildr had connected HQ's communication line to. "Hello? Ashildr, can you hear me?" Ash put one hand over her ear to listen better, holding the other up gesturing for Clara to hold the question she could see was on the tip of the brunette's tongue.

"Yeah, I hear you. What's the status on the deploy rovers?" Ash, Clara, and Ava had spent a while on their video call talking about how to get Bartok back to his home. They had eventually come up with Ava trying to get her volunteers to pick him up in the same vehicle they'd dropped him off in.

"Not good news I'm afraid… You see, the rovers are only managed by volunteers. We can't afford to hire enough people to release all the animals we rehabilitate, and so long distance missions like Bartok's can only be done every few months when we have the resources." Her tone was apologetic, but that didn't stop Ashildr from getting a little frustrated at the whole situation. Clara was watching her, only hearing half of the conversation.

She tried to keep her own voice calm and not snap at Ava because she knew that the woman was only helping. "What does that mean for us? Are you saying there is no one to fetch him?" There was a pause, a sigh, and then Ava's reply. "I… I'm not sure. I am trying to call people in, to get the resources and personnel, but it will most likely take me a few days… if not weeks… to set up a team. I'm sorry."

Ash looked back up at Bartok with annoyance at their ever growing more difficult predicament. "How did this even happen? Do we know anything else?"

"Like I said, everyone is just volunteers. Someone read the instructions wrong, and he was shipped to the wrong place. I also figured out that his location is the cause for the high pitched noise he was hearing. Bartok's tracker was specifically programmed for where he was supposed to live. When it was activated somewhere else, the station couldn't catch the signal properly, and the tracker gave off that horrible feedback to compensate." It seemed to Ashildr that Ava was happy to do something she could actually help with, and if that was give her useful information, Ash was all for it.

"I guess that makes sense."

"How's it going with him now? Is he behaving?" Ava asked. Ash watched as Clara went back to petting the beast. "Yes, He has Clara wrapped around his finger I believe." She spoke loudly enough for Clara to mock glare over her shoulder at the tease. Ava chuckled.

"Oh, uh, Dave has just come back with the files on the volunteers who worked with Bartok. I'm going to get to the bottom of this mistake and see that it doesn't happen again. After that I will keep working on getting him home." Ashildr heard Dave come in in the background audio even before Ava mentioned it.

"Okay. I will let you keep working. Keep in touch, and so will we." Ash started to pace a little as she wrapped up her conversation. "Yes. Thank you, Ashildr. And please thank Clara for me as well." The immortal gave her a curt nod before remembering that she couldn't see it, and instead saying "Roger that." She took out her earpiece and put it in the pocket of her black jeans that still smelled a little of the seawater she'd been drenched it only hours before.

Clara heard the conversation end, and came back over to stand by Ashildr. "What did she say?"

"Thanks." Ash started, sighing and crossing her arms while looking past the other woman to their beast on the beach. "She says that it could be weeks before she is able to send a team to come get him." She murmured, feeling lost.

"What are we going to do…" Ashildr asked half-heartedly. Bartok looked at them, his tongue lolling out, and the shorter immortal ran ideas and plans about getting him home alive and over and her mind. Clara didn't say anything, but instead she opened her end of the telepathic link, and expressed her optimism to Ashildr.

Telekinesis using the TARDIS was proving to work for more than just words. Whenever the brunette did this, It felt like Ash's thoughts became slightly fuzzy around the edges in order to pay attention to Clara. The impossible girl's emotional presence was warm and oddly complicated, nether needed to even form words for Clara to reassure her, and Ash to express her gratitude at the gesture.

Ashildr blinked slowly and took a deep breath and then looked back up at Bartok. "I fought with the TARDIS for a few minutes, but I think it doesn't want Bartok to come aboard, because it was being especially difficult about letting me try to make progress on the chamaeleon circuit. As it is, we won't be able to fit him in through the doors of the diner." Ash explained to Clara while she stroked part of Bartok's wing.

"Ok, Another, very important, lesson about TARDIS traveling is that you can always make your problem your solution. Use the enemy's power against them. So, how can we do that here? We need to get the great big beastie home safely." Clara seemed to dismiss all the pressure of the challenge ahead with the easy grace that she seemed so comfortable slipping into in times of crisis.

Ashildr turned back to her, smiling. "Look at you, with your never giving up." For a brief moment, Ash thought she saw something shift in Clara's expression. Like a shadow passed through her eyes and then vanished. She couldn't be sure though, it was gone so soon, and replaced with a completely different look in her eye.

"Cl-" She stepped into Ashildr and crashed their mouths together with really no warning, cutting her off. Clara clung on to her leather jacket and Ash, of course, melted against her lips and lifted a hand to cup Clara's cheek. _Eventually. Not yet._ Clara held the kiss for a long while, seeming to forget that Ashildr at least actually needed to breathe.

When she eventually did pull away for some much needed oxygen, the tunnel-vision and impulse that she had seen on Clara's face seemed to be gone. The younger woman turned her face into Ash's palm, closing her eyes and making a soft 'hmmm' noise.

"Clara?" She didn't need to say the 'are you ok,' she knew Clara heard it. She didn't reply for a moment, and Ash briefly looked over her shoulder to Bartok who was back to being entertained by his beach ball.

The chains that held the device to his back really didn't seem to bother him at all as they jiggled, Ava had been right. Ashildr supposed that maybe he couldn't even hear the noise the same way she could, given be was a an alien bat who could be driven wild by things at frequencies too high for her to hear naturally. …He was driven wild by the sound.

"That's it!" Ashildr exclaimed excitedly enough for Clara to finally let go of her, re-focus, and tilt her head in question.

* * *

"How sure are you about this?" Clara stroked Bartok's head rhythmically, looking up at Ashildr on his back nervously. "Oh, _now_ you think this is dangerous?" Ash teased. "Shut up." At that, Ashildr looked down at her and smiled, the sunglasses on her face.

"How do you know this is going to work?" Ashildr was fiddling with the tracker, kneeling on Bartok's back. The beast didn't seem to mind, Clara was petting him and he was paying full attention to her. "Use the problem and make it the solution, huh? What was our problem?" She didn't wait for an answer. "The tracker was making Bartok crazy. A frequency he couldn't hear was forcing him to do something he wouldn't normally do. If I can make the right sound at the precise volume, I should be able to convince him to follow the noise. I don't know it'll work… but it's our best bet." Clara glanced back up at her in time to see Ashildr pluck a small piece of tech from the tracker, pocket it, and close the device back up.

With that, Ash hopped off his back and put the glasses in her back pocket. "You want him to follow you all the way back to his home?" Clara was sceptical, but it really was a clever idea, and she couldn't think of a better one. "That's the plan! Okay, I have all the information I need now. Before when I scanned it I just wanted to know what it was. Now, I have the signal transmitter, and I hopefully can wire it to the TARDIS and work out a noise that works."

They walked back to the TARDIS through the tall, golden, grass in silence apart from Clara's encouraging words to Bartok to follow them. He did, if slowly. Clara had wanted to Bring the ship down nearer to the beach when they landed a second time, but she supposed the ship had her own ideas about how close she wanted to be to Bartok, because they had materialized just where they were before. Maybe the ship hadn't wanted to scare him off.

When they reached their spaceship Ash opened the door before saying briskly "You stay out here and watch him. It shouldn't take me too long to figure this out. Let me know when he starts to act differently." Clara nodded with a small smile, trying to hide the pang of hurt she felt at the distance in the other immortal's words. Ashildr disappeared into the ship and Clara went over to lean against Bartok who was sitting patiently.

"What did I do this time, aye?" She whispered to the creature. He just tilted his head and nugged at her shoulder. She patted his head. Clara knew, of course. She'd acted pretty strangely both on the station and just then on the beach. It seemed every time she thought she was feeling normal, something would happen to make her loose it and she would freak herself out at the craziness of it all again.

She crossed her arms around herself and kicked absently at the grass. Ashildr didn't deserve her Jekyll and Hyde behaviour, and she knew that. It made her feel pretty horrible. Her feelings and thoughts were damn complicated enough for herself, she shouldn't inflect them on Ashildr as well. But… hearing her say that on the beach? Ash had unknowingly reminded her that Clara only had _her_ now. The Doctor was gone from ber. _Danny_ was still gone. What would the two of them think of her snogging the viking immortal, she wondered half amused.

While she was lost in thought, Bartok perked his ears up and shifted his head to the TARDIS. When he suddenly stood to stalk over to it, Clara almost stumbled since she was leaning on him completely. ' _That'll do it.'_ She told Ashildr as she watched Bartok pace circles around the entire ship. His entire attention was on the TARDIS. A bomb could have gone off beside him and he wouldn't have even glanced over.

Clara joined Ashildr in the control room when she decided that Bartok was fully hypnotized by the signal she herself couldn't detect at all. "You were right, that works like a charm!" Ash didn't look up from her fiddling with the TARDIS controls when Clara entered. "I've got the location of where he is supposed to be on the screen. At the rate he can fly it should take us an hour at most- it really is a small planet." She pointed to the map on the screen.

"We've never flown the TARDIS like that before… I've only ever done that on The Doctor's TARDIS, and it is A, smaller by a lot, and B, a lot more docile than our feisty young model." Clara looked at the screen as she spoke so that she didn't have to watch Ash not look at her. "Well, it's our only option. And there are the both of us, we can do it together." It was clear Ash had noticed that Clara had noticed her distance and decided to end it. When she looked back at her Ashildr offered a small smile. Clara appreciated that.

* * *

"He's beautiful!" Clara called, the wind of their flight blowing her hair in her face. She held open the door to the diner, and the door to the the control room was propped open so that the two woman could shout to one another while Clara watched Bartok and Ashildr steered the ship by watching on the monitor. Once they'd gotten the hang of it Ash had insisted that Clara keep an eye on Bartok.

Bartok flew just below them, continuously glancing up at the TARDIS as they zoomed through the sky. His wingspan was almost twice as wide at the TARDIS, his bat wings beat over and over with ease. Clara was glad that the signal didn't seem to upset him too much, and she was comforted at the thought that he'd be home safe soon.

"Almost there!" Ash shouted, sounding excited, a rare thing for the immortal. Clara could barely see anything but clouds, and she knew Ashildr only knew their geography because of the locator and map she was following. The day she's died, Clara had flown like this in the blue box TARDIS over London with The Doctor and Rigsy on the last mystery she'd chased with the Timelord. She felt almost the same as that day, though she couldn't feel the cold or hear the pounding in her ears that came with such adrenaline.

The ship jerked, dropped a little in the sky, and shook a little. Bartok grunted at it and flew lower down, staying the same distance from it as it started to descent. Slowly, the clouds became more and more sparse, and Clara saw the breathtaking view below.

The Ornaya mountains were icy blue and grey, with little vegetation and many, many, caves and caverns. "Woah." She whispered to herself, eyes wide.

The diner shook again, and again, it fell a in the sky, a few more meters this time. "Ash?" She asked over her shoulder, a little worried. "Come help me!" Her tone was calm but her words were loud, so Clara hurried back to the console room.

She put her hand on one of the stabilizers that was opposite from where Ash could reach where she was, holding more important switches and leavers. Ashildr's focus was on the screen, her map gone and the view outside taking up the monitor.

"There! See that?" Ash nodded to a clearing below that came into view. They were getting closer to the surface of the planet much too quickly, Clara knew. "We are going too fast, Ash."

"I know, hold on-" She muttered. Again, the ship jerked, and Clara stumbled into the console. "Ash?"

"Just-" She dismissed. Clara tried to slow down the ship with the side breaks, but that didn't seem to do much. They just went faster. And faster. And faster.

"Ashildr!" Clara cried, running to the other side of the console and putting her hand over Ash's on the main lever to help keep it steady. They both pulled down as hard as they could, but the ship was already falling too quickly.

As it became larger on the screen, Clara saw that the spot Ash was aiming for was occupied by two other Mega Chiroptera. "Just stop, stop!" Ash smashed her other hand down on a button that she could barely reach, and the TARDIS slammed into nothing, stopping in mid air.

"Why didn't you do that earlier?!" Clara asked as she shook off the tenseness in her whole body from that nearly dangerous flight. "We need to land, and it's going to be like that no matter what we try!" Ash defended, also seeming a little shaken up.

"We don't need to land, look." Ash saw the other Mega Chiroptera on the mountain below, and then she blinked blankly at Clara. "Let him go, he's good from here." They were only maybe three stories off the ground.

Ashildr pulled a wire out of the signal transmitter and took it out of the TARDIS console all together. They both ran to the door to the diner when they heard Bartok roar.

He shook himself off, glared up at them, and then quickly flew down to the clearing below. They watched him greet the others of his species with nuzzles and chatter amongst everyone.

"Look at that!" Clara sighed. While they watched, Ash put her earpiece back in, and filled in Ava briefly. Clara tuned her out and watched the happy reunion.

"Yes, I'm afraid your tracker is shot, though. You won't be able to locate him." Ash finished, a hand over her ear. "You're welcome. Thank you for your help as well. Bye!"

When their brief conversation was over, Ash turned to Clara. "Well, looks like our work here is done." Clara nodded. "Where to next?" Ashildr leaned against the doorframe, her arms crossed and her eyes shining with the adventure behind them and the prospect of one ahead as well. She hadn't looked that excited for what's next before, Clara noted.

"Anywhere you want!" The smile Clara received spoke wicked tales of plans for danger, adventure, and hopefully a lot of running.


	15. Ch 14: Where the Hell Have You Been?

_**Long one again! You don't even know how hype I am for the one that comes after this, it's so great! And I finished this like five days before I'm posting it, allowing more time to write 15, so they will both be on time. Isn't that amazing? Enjoy!**_

* * *

 **Chapter 14 - Where the Hell Have You Been?:**

Ashildr stepped out of the diner and onto a courtyard in what looked like somewhere in England. It was raining lightly, but it wasn't too dark outside.

"No, I don't think this is the 1700s. There weren't cellphones in the 1700s, were there?" Ash called back to Clara in the diner. She watched a woman pass whose face was practically glued to her phone.

She looked around the area the TARDIS had landed in. As always, the ship had managed to find somewhere that it was just un-noticeable enough to be hidden in plain sight despite the size and colours of it. The chill air was a refreshing change from the last few places they'd been. (Space bases never had fresh air.)

Clara finally poked her head out of the door and looked around too. When she stepped into the sidewalk, she wrapped her arms around Ashildr's shoulders from behind her.

Clara was slowly becoming more and more affectionate and she had been ever since they'd set off from the planet Bartok lived on. That had been two weeks ago. The kisses they shared seemed to linger longer and longer, and Clara touching her had become so normal. _She_ didn't seem to mind at this point about the doom she Inevitably faced, or how bad of an idea it was for the two of them to be getting this close. Her warmth in the rain was comforting, though, Ash acknowledged, a little annoyed at herself. _Eventually. Not yet._

"Oh, you know what? This is the 20th century! That's pretty cool, We haven't been back to anywhere near my normal time since we went to talk to Rigsy about trap street." She didn't stumble over her words as she used to when speaking about her death. Ash hoped that meant Clara was starting to feel more at ease with her decision to postpone it.

Ash caught herself smiling at her companion when Clara stepped out into the rain and turned her face, smiling, towards the sky.

"Where the _hell_ have you been?" A man's loudly aggravated American accent rose over the quiet chatter of people around them to startle her. She turned her head while still facing her body towards Clara. Ashildr immediately held her breath when she saw who had shouted.

Over the last few billion years, every time she'd tried to picture him, nothing would come to mind. Seeing Captain Jack Harkness now, however, she had absolutely no trouble recognizing him.

He obviously recognized her too, for he was marching up to them with a glare in his eyes. "Where have I been?" She echoed neutrally. He glared until he was about four feet away, then he broke. Jack smiled wide, his whole face lighting up making his eyes twinkle. How could she have forgotten such a smile?

Ash stepped toward him and without hesitation, he pulled her into a hug. Apparently they'd had that sort of relationship- a hugging one. He was so much taller than her that after giving up trying to bend over, he just lifted her up off her feet. The gesture was so familiar that she oddly didn't mind the hug. To her own surprise Ashildr started to laugh with him when he spun her around.

When he finally put her down she was smiling. "Well?" He asked again. "Where have you been? What's that? Who's this?" He nodded to the TARDIS briefly and then turned all his attention to Clara who was standing off to the side a little awkwardly.

"Yes, um. I've been... everywhere in the universe. This is our TARDIS." She shielded her mouth from Clara's view with one hand as she said "Stole it from The Doctor." Clara made a noise of disagreement but Ash just kept on. "And before you ask, no, you can't have it." She held up a finger when he opened his mouth to ask questions.

Then she nodded to Clara. "This is Clara." Again, she covered her mouth, "Also stolen from The Doctor." That made him smile. "Clara, this is Jack." Clara held out her hand and offered a smile right back at him.

"And no, you can't have _her_ either." She added scoldingly when he gave Clara an interested look.

He ignored her completely, and said "Captain Jack Harkness, at your service." He bowed, taking Clara's hand and kissing the back of it while shooting a sly look at Ash. She knew he was just doing it to tick her off, so she didn't get mad at his annoyance.

"What year is it, Jack?" Ash looked around them to see the everyday lives of everyday people passing her by. "It's 2008. Why, when have you been?" Now he was asking the right questions. She sighed and glanced at Clara briefly before responding.

"That is a very long story..." Ashildr didn't know how much he knew at this point in his timeline. Had she left for good or just disappeared for awhile as she did? Jack gave her an understanding look, and she was reminded that he had traveled with The Doctor once, and he understood the struggle of timing.

"Why don't you two come back to the base with me and we can catch up out of the rain? It's been nearly two years since I saw you last." Captain Harkness sounded eager to speak with Ash more. When Clara nodded her agreement, Ash said "That would be nice, thank you."

He looked past them at the TARDIS. "Is the ship ok left here?" He said hesitantly. Instead of explaining, Ash demonstrated their camouflage mechanism by locking the door with the key around her neck. The TARDIS vanished, invisible.

"Cool! Why a diner?" He asked, starting to lead the way. The two women exchanged a glance before Clara said "That's a long story… You traveled in the blue box TARDIS, right? With Sandshoes?" Jack gave her a look.

Clara and Ashildr both had to walk quickly to keep up with his longer stride, and when he noticed, he offered an arm to each of them, and together they kept him walking slower. Ash thought begrudgingly about what people would think upon seeing him with the two women on his arms. She didn't really care all that much, Jack was one of very few people she considered her friend, and it felt so normal to be around him.

" _Sandshoes?"_ He asked, clearly confused. Ashildr didn't know what she was talking about either. "Yeah, you know, The Doctor that wore sandshoes and said 'Allons-y!' All the time." She spoke with fondness, But Ashildr didn't think she'd known that regeneration of The Doctor. "Well mostly the one before that one but yes, him too I guess. What about you?" They crossed a street and a taxi honked at them.

"Well, I've actually met them all. My Doctor, The Doctor I spent the most time with, is one I'm sure you haven't met." When it seemed like they were going to keep talking about The Doctor, and even maybe spiral into a conversation that may end up with Jack asking Clara about the events that caused her to leave him, Ash cleared her throat.

"Where are we?" She wanted a change of subject. Jack seemed ok with it. "Cardiff, where I live, the base is here in Mermaid Quay."

"We were aiming for the late 1700s. Clara wanted to go to a ball." Ash scrunched up her face to tell them just what she thought about that. "She got us in trouble on the last _two_ trips, and so she owed me an adventure of my choice without grumbling. That's hard to come by, I'm learning." Jack nodded in whole hearted agreement.

The last two adventures she had been referring to were actually one that was carried out in two parts. Firstly, Ashildr had punched a guy who they'd come across when she saw him yelling at a kid, and they had been thrown in prison because it turned out he was the duke of some legion she'd never heard of.

After they'd gotten out, she'd made it worse by calling out his lies when he told of a great starwhale he'd slane, explaining the whales were extinct, and he had made it all up. The duke was selling fake parts of the animal he'd claimed to have hunted for some ungodly price. Apparently calling him a liar hadn't been the wisest thing to do because it had almost gotten them turned into taxidermy.

Before Jack could make some comment at her expense, Ash cut in with "I don't _grumble,_ and I didn't _get us in trouble."_ She stood by her actions in both those situations, though they'd ended rather disastrously. At Her tone, Jack tugged her closer and laughed. "I've missed you." She smiled a little.

"The crew has missed you too." Ash rolled her eyes. "Your crew hated me, what are you even talking about!" Clara glanced over at her with a questioning look. "They do not!" Jack chuckled. "Yes, every time I was at HQ everyone would glare at me! And remember how hard Toshiko fought to not let me make the journals?"

Jack sighed. "You and I were very cliquey around them. They don't know a whole lot about me, and especially Ianto and Gwen were taken back at how much you and I talk about the past." Ashildr didn't say anything to that, but she didn't have to, because they turned a corner into the Quay.

"Here we are!" Jack singsonged.

* * *

Clara was definitely intimidated. They'd come in on an _invisible_ lift for goodness sake. Jack was not at really what she'd expected when The Doctor had told her of the Captain, nor when Ashildr described her closest friend. He was handsome, charismatic, _American,_ but most of all, he knew Ashildr. No one knew Ashildr. That was like her one defining trait- a lot of people had heard of her, sure, but no one _knew_ her.

Maybe Jack knew Ash better than Clara did, she thought while sipping on the warm cup of tea she'd been given by one of Jack's people, Ianto. The three of them, Clara, Ash, and Jack, were how lounging in his office down in Torchwood HQ underneath the city streets in Cardiff.

Jack was reminding Ashildr about adventures they'd shared, and Ash was politely pretending to recall some of it.

Clara would contribute some things here or there when she felt like she could, but mostly she just watched the two interact. Maybe Clara was intimidated at the prospect of someone who knew Ashildr better than her, but the feeling of satisfaction in knowing Ash had had a friend like Jack once upon a time was still strong.

The digital clock on his desk told her it was half past three. She wondered how long they'd be staying. (Not that she really minded if it was an hour or a week, she'd just like to know.) Ashildr and Clara had been traveling in the Diner for maybe a month and a half. It was really quite hard to tell time when living in a TARDIS, because for one, you end up in a lot of different places for a wide range of times, and also the TARDIS doesn't have any timezone so if you aren't keeping track you can't really know how long you've been there for.

Clara tuned back into the conversation when Ashildr started to talk about Drosh the bird prince and saving that city from his clutches. "I had to end up going to the Judoon in order to scare him off. You were a time agent, you know all about that, right? Like, they are supposed to be the intergalactic law enforcement, but you have to bring a problem directly to them for anything to get done it seems."

Clara herself had had very few interactions with the Judoon, but from what The Doctor had told her of them she'd thought they were more of a private task force, not the space police.

"Ashildr, I-" Clara began to inquire about them before Jack cut in with "'Ashildr?' Really, Me? You aren't even giving your traveling companions your real name?" Clara watched Ash glare at him slightly.

"Actually, Jack, Clara has it right. I went by 'Me' since I was about eighty years old," (apparently she'd gone back in her journals and checked after deciding to let Clara call her Ashildr,) "but 'Ashildr' is my given name."

"Or Ash." Clara added with a grin at Jack. The oldest of the three immortals rolled her eyes in mock annoyance.

"And I think _I_ am _her_ companion, not the other way around." Ashildr commented with defeat in her tone. Clara smiled a little at that.

"I first met her with The Doctor when she was just a viking girl getting herself into trouble." Clara spoke with her eyes staring down at the mug in her hands. "You mean getting everyone into trouble! If it wasn't for me you would have successfully gotten rid of the Mire and my village would've stayed safe. If I had kept my mouth shut then I wouldn't have died and The Doctor wouldn't have made me immortal."

Choosing to ignore the wistful way she spoke about never becoming immortal, Clara said "You were just a kid standing up for what you knew."

She paused in thought before continuing, "You've barely changed at all since then, really." Ashildr scoffed at her and Clara made a hasty correction. "No, I mean, of course you've changed, you grew up, but you are still the same person deep down. You're still clever and quick, and you still always put others before yourself even after all these years. The only difference is that now you don't even know that you are doing it. I remember when The Doctor was about to leave your village to fend for yourselves and you got up to beg for his help even before I could. It's like you're programmed to defend what you know and care about- that hasn't changed one bit. I think that's why The Doctor and I didn't accept that you wanted to be known by another name- we couldn't see what you didn't like about being Ashildr." The whole time she spoke she was still watching the steam from her tea rise like the smoke from a tiny fire.

Clara only looked up when she realized that all she had said had driven Jack and Ash to silence.

* * *

"Are you going to explain your new found tolerance for humans?" Jack leaned back in his chair and clasped his fingers together, resting his hands over his mouth. She narrowed her eyes at him because that was such a power move on his part and she didn't know what had caused him to behave like that.

Clara had been summoned away by two of Jack's crew, Gwen and Tosh. Ash had her suspicions about Jack's involvement in the two women coming in to ask Clara about The Doctor, calling the brunette away from their conversation. Apparently they wanted to know a more about anything Doctor, Alien, or earth future. Ashildr didn't think Clara could/would tell them much, but with a knowing glance at Jack and Ash she left his office willingly to let them ask her questions.

"I've always liked humans." She countered, a small, crooked smile on her lips. A memory if the two of them referring to others as humans as if they themselves were not tugged at her mind.

Ashildr didn't really consider herself human, though she wasn't anything else more. She May look like a teenager to some, but she'd lost her childhood the very first time she'd killed someone. She'd lost her humanity the day she lost count.

"You said something along the lines of 'screw The Doctor, we _don't_ need the mayflies!' What happened to that? Now you've got one of your own, finally gave in like the rest of us?" 'The rest of us' was really just him, he just liked to be dramatic. "I can only applaud your choice, she's nice, for a mayfly." He teased.

When Ash took a sip of her tea and didn't say anything, avoiding his gaze, Jack leaned forward, widening his eyes at her. "...You didn't. Ashildr, you said you wouldn't! It was you who told me we just _couldn't."_

She sighed. "I didn't do it, Jack, The Doctor made her immortal. By accident, of course. And not in any good way, ether." He raised an eyebrow at her. "How'd you mean?"

Ashildr glanced over her shoulder to peer through the glass that separated his office from the rest of the Torchwood base. Tosh and Clara were talking by a computer, Gwen was nearby, and the guys were nowhere to be seen. "It's a long story. She can't stay immortal forever, that's all."

"Neither can we. No one can live _forever."_

Ash looked back at him, and he regarded her with something resembling concern. "How long has it been?" She looked down at her hands. "Long."

"I never thought we'd reach the day when you forgot me." He mused. "I haven't forgotten you, I just don't remember what happened. You said two years? Where did I go?"

"I don't know. You do that a lot. It's not like you leave me contact information." He sounded upset but she thought he was just kidding. "Well if this is 2008 I can't be gone forever…" Clara said Trap street happened in 2015. "I'll see you again, and I'm sure you know not to tell Me about this." He'd dealt in time travel before.

"Yes! And you know what, you have a TARDIS now. You and Clara better come visit me." Ashildr knew she couldn't make such promises now, but she intended to visit him only after Me left earth. Thinking of it, a sudden image flooded her mind.

 _She stood in the downpour outside the Torchwood base with a backpack and tears streaming down her face. "Jack, please…"_

 _Six months since Clara died. She'd left Trap street in the hands of Kate. The Unit director had left her with promises of her legacy being honoured, but Me knew that her sanctuary would crumble without her and her Quantum Shade. She still had it, and it would be her first order of business when she was off planet to be rid of it. Me hadn't used it since Clara. Not once._

 _She had been able to finally find some lost alien with a working ship to take her away from the only planet she'd ever known, and she was ready to leave the moment she heard it was possible. She'd gathered the few things she thought she might need for a new life hitchhiking the galaxy in her bigger-on-the-inside bag with her bigger-on-the-inside journals, all but one empty, and gone to bang on Jack's door at some ungodly hour._

 _It was finally time for her to get out of there. Off earth, away from memories. Memories. Memories. She'd done all she could there, there was nothing left for her with humans who wouldn't reach the stars and actually find life for hundreds of years. Just her._

 _Her, and Jack. But there he stood, trench coat, captain's hat and all, refusing her. "You are all I have left, you have to come. Just you and Me. Against the universe." He tried to touch her shoulder, but she jerked away._

" _Just come inside and we can talk about this." He soothed. "No, I won't. Why are you doing this? What is here for you?" The rain pounded on the sidewalk, and she tried to shout sense into him._

" _Torchwood is mine. My crew needs me. Earth needs us. Stay, Me. Stay here, there's a place for you here." His efforts were half-hearted, he knew she wouldn't listen. "No!" She cried. "They will die. Jack, don't be stupid, come with me. They'll all die on you. They'll blow-"_

" _Blow away like smoke. Yes. I know. But they are still just as important as you and me. And they are my family, I can't leave." She stared at him for a long time then. She stared, it rained, Jack waited._

" _Goodbye, Captain Jack Harkness."_

" _Goodbye, Me."_

Sometimes it happened like that. She'd have a almost dream-like flashback where some unwanted memory would devour her thoughts. Normally it wasn't helpful, but at least this time it was relevant.

"Ok, we will." She searched his eyes for something else she might say. "I missed you, too, I think. We'll be back. Please don't scare Clara off, though." Jack smiled that wonderful smile of his.

"I wouldn't dream of it."


	16. CH 15: Infinite Pathway

_**Woah I actually posted on time two weeks in a row! I wasn't planning for the adventure they set off on at the end of this chapter, but at least I know what I'm going to do now. My note with all the chapters planned out has the next 18 at least, so this is going to be a long fic. I need to get back into the habit of actually switching perspectives halfway through, this one is all Clara's again. Oops. Anyway this one was fun, enjoy!**_

* * *

 **Chapter 15 - Infinite Pathway:**

Clara's eyes opened when she felt freezing cold air rush at her face. It blew through her hair and the force of the wind made it hard to breathe.

She stumbled forward, slipped, and fell, her chin painfully smashing the ground taking most of the fall for her. She reached up to her face and her hand came back with a stream of crimson blood trickling down the back of it. The cut under her chin stung painfully and she covered it with her palm.

Head pounding from the strangeness of it all, she heaved herself into a sitting position. Only then was she able to look around.

There was barely any light ahead of her, but even so it became abundantly clear that she didn't know where she was. The whole atmosphere around her was grey, and cloudy, and bitter in every sense of the word. Clara saw that she was sitting on a suspended pathway that stretched far into the distance. As if that wasn't strange enough, Clara noted that she sat there in one of the tank-tops and cotton shorts that she wore to bed.

The path was made of cold, hard, stone that ended abruptly on each side. Very slowly, she peered over the edge. Far, far, below the path was what looked like the earth. She must have been up twice as high as the Eiffel tower, because she could still see buildings between the clouds, but not very well. Tiny movements of cars between grey skyscrapers indicated life below, but up in the sky where she was everything was still but the wind and her racing heart.

"Hello?" Her voice came out as a croak, fighting the sounds of the rushing storm with little ground made. She squinted to look ahead of her but saw nothing but the path stretching infinitely. "Hello? Is anyone there? Where am I?" She shouted, still holding her hand to her face.

Still no response. After a moment filled with panic and adrenaline, Clara stood up on shaky legs. She felt dizzy and extremely disoriented, but she still managed to turn around on the pathway without falling off. Her mind cleared and the pain seemed to stop immediately when she saw the other Immortal standing on the path too.

Ashildr was thirty feet away from her and upwind, which made the fact that she hadn't heard Clara's shouts reasonable. Her long raven hair blew violently away from her somber face as she stared down at the world below. Ash just stood there, not moving. She didn't know Clara was there, she realized.

Suddenly the path and the wind and the earth and the sky didn't matter. They were just background noise blacked out by the blinders Clara's view became as she ran toward her friend. Her bare feet moved like thunder.

"Ashildr!" She called frantically, hoping she was close enough for her to hear. Ash whirled around like a flash, her eyes widening in pure, utter, astonishment. The Viking stumbled back from her and her foot slipped off the path. In that one simple action, Ashildr tripped and fell. One moment she was standing just in front of Clara, and then she was falling off the path to planet below.

"ASH!" Clara screamed. She reached down uselessly as she reached the spot Ashildr had been standing in and her tears disappeared into the sparse clouds after her.

Clara sat up wide awake in her bed. She was breathing heavily until she stopped all together, remembering that she didn't need to actually catch her breath. She checked her pulse. No heartbeat. The cut on her chin was none-existent. She must have been dreaming? It had felt so real! The cold, the pain, the fear... _Ashildr_.

Clara shot to her feet, throwing the covers onto the floor. The TARDIS door slid open and she marched down the hallway silently, her head still racing from the intensity of only a few minutes before.

She guessed that the spaceship could sense her thoughts or at a least emotions just then, because it only took one turn down the corridor for her to get where she was going. Clara raised her hand to knock, but the door to Ashildr's room slid open silently before she could even ask.

Ash was sitting cross-legged on her bed in the dark looking down at her hands. ' _Ash_.' The immortal looked up, turning her head to her, and Clara saw that tears streamed down her cheeks though she didn't sob, and her expression didn't give the impression that she was upset. In three quick steps Clara was across the room. She sat down behind Ashildr on the bed.

Both of their bedrooms had been made by the TARDIS for them when they first spoke of needing a place to sleep. Clara's own room was a combination of what the TARDIS drew from her memory of her flat at home, and her room in The Doctor's TARDIS. She didn't know what memories or details had made up Ashildr's room, and she'd never cared to ask. The older woman didn't seem to sleep in her room very often, but she had expressed her fondness for it when she had first come across it in the spaceship. Clara was glad to find her here now, though, because at least it kind of confirmed her impulse theory about what had happened.

"I was in your dream, wasn't I? I actually entered your dream?" Clara whispered with more confidence in her theory than she felt. Ash nodded a little. When she couldn't think of anything to say to comfort her, Clara put her hand on Ashildr's knee. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you fall-"

"Don't be sorry." Ash said quietly. "You are crying! Of course I'm going to be sorry." Clara disagreed, leaning closer to her and resting her chin on Ash's shoulder. Closing her eyes for a moment, she silently appreciated Ashildr's slow, consistent breathing pattern.

"I don't want to cry, I don't need to cry, it's just that my stupid tear ducts still think I am a teenage girl." She said with a humourless laugh.

Ash put her hand over Clara's own. "I..." she paused, and Clara waited patiently. "Clara I have nightmares every night, and I always... die... at the end, so really, don't be sorry for startling me, it was going to happen anyway. That's why I don't really sleep all that much, I was just so tired and..." Clara hated hearing such pain in the other woman's words.

"Every night?" She asked a little surprised, opening her eyes and pulling her head back to look at Ashildr. "Almost, yeah." Ash was quiet for a minute so Clara asked "What normally happens?"

"I don't know... it's always some crazy story that could be worked out and explained as a metaphor if I cared enough to try." Ashildr used to be a storyteller, Clara remembered.

"That sounds..." Not being able to catch the words she reached for to continue in any useful direction, Clara trailed off and just shut her mouth. "I don't know why the telepathic connection would have patched you in now, sorry you had to join me in the literal hell that is my dreamworld."

This whole time they'd both been looking in the same direction at nothing in particular, so Clara wasn't able to see Ash's expression. Now, though, Clara pulled her legs up onto the bed and leaned forward to catch her eye.

"Now you don't be sorry. Maybe the TARDIS put me there for a reason? I'm no dream guru... but maybe it'd be more fun if I was there too?" With a sigh, Ashildr fell back against her pillow and stared up to the tall ceiling of her bedroom. Clara still sat beside her and gazed at her hoping she'd say something more.

"I don't know, Clara." Whispered the immortal. Clara reached out to brush a strand of Ash's hair out of her face, and when she pulled her hand away Ash was looking up at her instead.

"In your dream... I had a heartbeat. I could feel the cold." Clara began talking without any idea of her actual point. "I haven't had a dream of my own since I was pulled out of my timestream."

Ash blinked at her a little sleepily. "I was surprised you can sleep at all in your... condition, to be honest with you." She said with a little smile.

"Oh god, imagine a life where I couldn't sleep! The long way around wouldn't be worth it if I was constantly exhausted from chasing monsters but not able to sleep!" Clara teased with a dramatic eye roll at 'Oh god.'

Ash just gazed at her fondly for a while before changing the topic completely by asking "What did you think of Jack, by the way?" A little taken aback by the question, Clara replied "I think he's great. I liked how happy you were to see him." The second part she said a little slower and Ash quirked an eyebrow at her. "Is that a hint of jealousy I hear, Miss Oswald?"

Clara could feel her cheeks flush and hoped that it was dark enough in Ash's room for the other immortal to not be able to see. "No! No, of course not. He's just... not the kind of person I would ever have imagined you getting along with, that's all." Ashildr smiled again and she reached up and tugged Clara's shoulder gently to pull her down beside her. Clara didn't protest, she even invited herself under the covers and clasped her fingers in between Ash's.

Ashildr pulled the blanket up to her chin and Clara had to push it away from her face. Clara decided that she could really get used to laying beside Ashildr in a bed that smelled like her. She closed her eyes again.

"Ash, if I ever find myself in your dream again... oh, I don't know. Just... look for me, ok?" Clara squeezed her hand to let her know she meant it. Ash rolled onto her side and Clara felt her other arm incircle her waist. "I will."

* * *

Upon waking up Clara had found herself alone in a strange room. It looked like Ashildr's room, but wasn't quite. She squinted as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, and she spotted a second door on the wall that cornered the first, a mirror that looked suspiciously like one from her own room hung over a desk she didn't recognize, and on top of all that, there was a whole new section of the room where a reading chair and lamp sat companionably.

She pulled herself out of bed and opened the new door, finding that it led to the massive TARDIS closet that held all kinds of clothes from all time periods and planets. Finding the section of their closet Clara had made her own by collecting all she cared to find that she would normally wear on an average day on earth for her, she changed out of her nightwear and into a pair of black jeans and a blouse.

Spotting an area of the room that displayed many beautiful ballroom dresses and gowns, Clara was reminded that they never actually got to go to a ball like they'd set off to do when they ran into Jack. She put it back on her 'to do list.' She'd loved the few dances from the 1700s that The Doctor had taken her too. Bow-tie had actually danced with her, of course, but Eyebrows had refused. She was confident that she could drag Ashildr into dancing with her.

Before she left, Clara caught a glimpse of the case in which her death outfit awaited Trap street and the raven. She refused to look. Her hand rubbed at the tattoo on the back of her neck nervously for a moment before she left the closet and then the bedroom.

"The TARDIS deleted my bedroom." Announced the impossible girl, leaning against the doorframe between the console room and the diner.

Ash was sitting at one of the booths, looking at a journal in front of her. Her hair was parted down the middle and with both hands she was plaiting a thick dutch braid down one side. The other half was waiting it's turn.

"Yeah, I noticed that too." She said a little smugly, looking up. Clara walked over and sat down across from her. Oscar was sleeping on the table beside the journal.

"What are you reading?" Clara kept her eyes on Ash's hands as she flipped each part of hair over and over each other. "Oh, you know, memories and adventures." She finished the one braid and moved on to the other.

Clara reached out to pet the cat. She wondered weather to bring up last night. The nightmare, their conversation, Clara falling asleep in her bed… She supposed that the TARDIS had spared them the conversation of weather or not the whole sleeping in the same bed thing would continue.

"I spoke to the voice interface again." Ash said, finishing the second braid and then closing her book. "Was it still my mother?" She asked neutrally. Clara had preferred seeing her mum, Ellie, over The Doctor and definitely over Danny, but it has still freaked her out a little bit.

It had been a long time since her mum died, and Clara had made her peace with it a few years ago. Her mother had never known the Clara who traveled through time and space, the impossible girl. To her, Clara had just been her daughter. Not The Doctor's companion, not the person woven through time to save him, not even the woman with the '000' tattoo on the back of her neck.

Thinking of her mum got her thinking of her leaf. Maybe she should go and get it at some point. If they were careful they should be able to grab it from her flat far enough along her timeline that it wouldn't be missed.

Clara realized she hadn't been listening to anything Ashildr was saying when the other immortal snapped her fingers in front of her face. "Hellooooo!"

"S-Sorry." She looked back up at her.

"I was just saying that no, the voice interface wasn't still your mother. It was an old man I don't recognize. The TARDIS said his name was Clayton, and that he was from my past. It wasn't kidding, apparently he was my housekeeper in the 1600s. Anyway, I don't remember him, obviously, but I thought that that form might be more appropriate for the voice interface than your mother, so I asked it to be that way whenever we summoned it." While Ash explained she searched Clara's expression, supposedly for her opinion.

Clara nodded. She agreed that that seemed better than having to see her dead mother all the time. "What did you talk to him about?"

"Well, I wanted to know more about… this." Ash re-opened her book and flipped through pages until she found what she was looking for. She held up the journal for Clara to see. Between paragraphs of writing was a word drawn in circular Gallifreyen.

"What does it say?" Once The Doctor had tried to explain Gallifreyen to Clara, but it was so complicated, and all his explanations didn't make sense to her because the grammar he described was too far from English or any human language really that she hadn't wanted to learn more.

"Not sure. A while ago I wanted to learn the TimeLord's language, and when I went looking I learned that there is a whole dictionary in Gallifreyan that has an easy translation into human Latin. Apparently, a certain TimeLord got bored one day and made the transcription." The sparkle in her eye suggested exactly _which_ bored TimeLord would do such a thing. Clara could almost hear her Doctor explaining the invention of such a book off as a way to settle some debate or even a bet with Leonardo Da Vinci.

"This," she pointed again to the symbol, "is what it's called _and_ apparently where it can be found. I think some member of the Gallifreyen high council heard of it's existence and ordered it to be hidden away for reasons of secrecy and cultural preservation or something." Clara could see the timelords hiding something from everyone by leaving the clue to it's whereabouts in a language only they knew.

She smiled, getting what Ash was hinting at. "And you want to find and steal it? So much for 'cultural secrecy,' right?" Ash didn't look amused. "We live in a stolen TARDIS, I think we are far past disrespecting the TimeLords. It would be nice to be able to actually read that manual, don't you think? There's never been a better reason for me to learn the language."

"True. So, did Clayton have anything helpful to say about it?" Ash turned the book back to gaze at the symbol. "No. Which was disappointing. I think that this TARDIS is a pretty new model as the space/time ships go, and it doesn't know everything. It refused to translate the symbol for me." Ash traced the word with a finger as she wrote.

"Yeah, the translation field doesn't do Gallifreyan." Clara agreed, leaning back. "That's the thing, though. If tells us where the book is, and it's written in a language the TARDIS understands, maybe _we_ don't need to read it! Maybe the ship knows where this place is and it can bring us right there."

Clara narrowed her eyes at Ashildr. "Ok, we can go looking for a legendary dictionary, but, don't think you've gotten us out of going to a ball in the 1700s." Ash laughed a little, standing up with her book. Oscar noticed her leaving and stood, stretched, and hopped off the table to follow her to the control room. Clara followed as well.


	17. CH 16: Guardless Castle

_**Omg it's been 49 days I'm so sorry! School has been hell so I haven't had time to write. Anyway this chapter is a little lame but the next one is going to be pretty fun I think! Clara's doubts and Ash's worries like always, stealing, and Ashildr learning pop culture from Clara. Enjoy.**_

* * *

 **Chapter 16 - Guardless Castle:**

Ashildr swung her legs hanging below her absently while they watched as the sky grew darker.

"I hope this works." She said with a sigh, clearly _not_ referring to the seven of spades she placed down on the third pile in the middle. Clara scowled at the move, and took her time to place when Ash discarded a card, ending her turn.

"Me too." Clara checked the twenty-four hour digital watch she had put on for just this occasion. "It's 20:43. The eclipse is scheduled for 21:04." Ash had one just like it on her own wrist.

The two immortals were sitting on the branch of a huge tree in the outskirts of a forest, playing what Clara called 'spite and malice.' In front of them stretched a great plain that kissed the horizon. The flat landscape stood flawless, only impaired by the great stone fortress that sat between them and the sunset.

"Can we go over it again?" She asked hopefully, fully expecting the exasperated expression she earned from Clara.

"The lifeform scanner said there is no one even there! What kind of fortress made to protect something valuable doesn't have guards? When the security is down we can waltz right in and snatch up our prize. It'll be fine." She played a card from her dwindling stack, one from her discard pile, and then two more consecutively from her stack, leaving one left.

"You don't know that." Ashildr deadpanned. "We've been over it three times." Clara's expression agreed with her tone that she was really bored of being drilled by Ashildr with their plan.

"I know, I know, it's just… last time we got separated on an adventure I nearly got us burned alive." Ashildr avoided her gaze by focusing on placing down a few cards, finishing a pile.

"That was different, we know what's going on now, we have a plan." ' _And if anything goes wrong, we can still reach each other.'_ Clara said, and as always, her voice in her head soothed Ash's worries.

"And besides," continued Clara with a matter-of-fact flip of her hair, "I couldn't have been burned alive. I can't be burned, and I'm _not alive._ " Ash gave her a look. "You don't know that. We _still_ don't know the limits of your immortality."

"Yeah, it's strange it hasn't really come up yet. I was okay when Bram knocked me out, so don't you think that means I function like normal?" Ashildr didn't like being reminded of that very much. She paused before replying. "I don't know, and I don't think we should make any assumptions. And still be careful. More careful- _really_ careful. We don't know if you would heal if you were injured."

Without Ash even realizing it had been her last, Clara played the final card from her stack, and promptly fist-pumped the air.

"I win!"

Ashildr could be very competitive at times, especially with Clara, but this card game she'd been dragged into was far below their upcoming task on her priority list.

"When the the eighth moon fully covers the first sun, and the seventh covers the second sun, the whole planet's systems will go down." Clara was right, they _had_ gone over the plan three times, but Ashildr said it out loud again to make sure neither of them forgot any detail as she shuffled the two decks back together.

Every detail was important because they had limited time to get in to the fortress, find and get the dictionary, and get out. The lunar eclipse would cut power to the whole place because the tiny planet they were on ran completely on solar electricity, and the base would be vulnerable. The eclipse only lasted for thirty-two minutes, though.

Ash put the cards in her leather jacket pocket. It was in fact the same jacket she'd had since Clara and The Doctor had picked her up at the end of the universe, but after spending a night on a hanger in the TARDIS closet, it had gained a significant amount of pocket room that could only be accredited to TimeLord technology.

"Then, we can walk right in and-"

"I thought you were an excellent robber? It'll be fine." Clara sounded impatient. She hopped down off the tree branch onto the roof of the invisible TARDIS that was only half a meter below their dangling feet. Muttering to herself about how just because she was in fact the best thief in the universe didn't mean they shouldn't prepare properly, Ashildr followed Clara down the latter on the side of the diner to stand on the rocky ground of the planet.

They left the TARDIS protected by it's invisibility sitting next to the tree on the plains of the small planet. The castle before them reminded Ashildr of something out of the medieval age on earth, with its cobblestone walls and regal towers jutting up into the sunset sky. Of course, it only looked like that on the outside. Inside, Ash knew from her extensive research that went into planning the heist, was nothing below the most modern TimeLord architecture and technology.

Clara didn't say anything as they walked, she clearly was un-bothered by Ash's audibly agitated silence. When the two were about thirty feet away from the fortress, they stopped, glanced at one another, and nodded in unison.

"20:57." Clara reported, glancing at her wrist. "See you in half an hour." She briefly put a hand behind Ashildr's neck, leaned in, and pecked her cheek before turning and slinking away to the left of the castle.

Ash sighed, watched her go for a moment, and then turned away, making a big circle around the fortress that would bring her to the East facing side. She wondered if this planet used the 'North, East, South West,' system made up by humans as she glanced to the moons which were almost entirely covering their respective suns. The whole planet was developed for one reason, and one reason only; to protect the book that Clara and Ashildr were after on this very day.

Everything was almost dark now, and some lights which were previously visible from inside the castle were starting to flicker out from lack of power. This planet was so small that it ran entirely on solar power. However, unlike earth solar electricity, this place didn't store energy in batteries. This worked because there were solar panels on opposite sides of the planet which meant that electricity was always available, even when night consumed one or the other side.

The only time that the castle lost power was when this very eclipse happened, every three hundred years or so. The brief loss of power made the otherwise almost indestructible defences on the castle inactive for a few golden minutes.

Ash reached the side of the castle she was to enter through. The two immortals were coming in on different sides to work together from a distance in order to secure the document. Clara would have to deal with the moat that surrounded her side of the fortress, but luckily for her, all that Ashildr had to do was make it up the wall and onto a balcony ten meters above her head. No big deal.

The Viking moved along the wall for a few moments, feeling the surface with her hands until she found… yes! Perfect. A loose stone.

She hadleft the sonic sunglasses with Clara, but as long as she had a few out of place stones on the wall, she wouldn't need them. Ash pulled the wiggly one out, throwing it to the side. The small hole in the wall it left didn't go all the way through, there was actual strong metal under the surface decor, but it was enough of a foothold all the same.

With a little jump, a carefully placed foot, and expert balance, Ash was able to stand on one foot, pressed against the wall about two meters off the ground. Then on to a large one jutting from the surface a little, and one more above that, and she was high enough to put her hands on the edge of the ledge and scramble up it.

When she stood on the balcony, brushing dust off of her black jeans, the final lights which had stayed on dutifully through the dwindling supply of solar electricity gave out, and finally the whole fortress was dark. Ash then silently opened the glass door that was normally locked electrically, and crept inside with ease.

Crossing the moat had been easier than anticipated. No crocodiles, no singing siren mermaids waiting to lure passers by into the water, in fact, no one there but her. All Clara had to do was to place a light enough log which she'd found outside the castle over the narrowest part of the water and tip-toe her way over. Clara liked calling the building before her a castle, even though it had no royals and many more LED lighting fixtures rather than chandeliers.

Those LED lights had just all went out when she made it in through a window that's latch wasn't activated. Clara wore the sonics to see in the dark, a recurring theme with the sunglasses she was learning. Ashildr had been right, the inside was much more high-tech than the exterior, with grey-tinted glass walls and detailed archways.

After glancing around briefly, Clara set off to find her destination. She opened doors and peered around corners until she found a staircase leading down below the castle.

It had taken several days to gather the information they'd needed in order to plan the entire robbery down to the second. The level of knowledge she had of this place seemed to her like overkill, based on how once she and The Doctor had broken into The Bank of Karabraxos with zero recollection of agreeing to do so.

Clara and Ashildr splitting up however, was not overkill. Before embarking on this adventure they'd done all the intel recon they could with books, Ash's journals, and even a conversation with one very strange peddler. All that had told them just enough to figure out the best way of getting in: the eclipse.

However, where in the building the dictionary was kept was a mystery. Based on Ashildr's almost creepy knowledge of how super-lairs are laid out, she knew that blueprints of the place would be around somewhere in the basement, which was exactly where Clara was headed. When she found what she was looking for, she'd be able to tell Ashildr exactly where in the main part of the building (where the immortal would already be,) she would find the book. This carefully thought out strategy was necessary because of the time crunch.

It was very quiet in the basement. Well, it was quiet everywhere in the castle, but down in the maze of hallways she'd found herself in, the quiet was almost scary. As Clara quickly searched for some room where she might find what she was after, the silence started to bother her more and more. She decided to see how Ash was doing. ' _Ashildr? I'm in the basement looking around for a map. Are you inside?'_ Her watch read 21:08.

' _Now who's worried? Yeah, yeah, I'm here. It's just as fancy inside as I thought it would be, seriously.'_ Even though they'd only been apart for a few minutes, knowing that the plan was going well for Ashildr too and hearing her voice was comforting to Clara. _'As soon as I find something I'll let you know.'_ She concluded, peering into another door to find nothing but a few chairs and a card table.

' _Awaiting your instructions then.'_ After that last message, Clara could almost feel Ash tune out of their conversation. She told herself that that was good, that they should both be focusing on their tasks.

A guilt that always weighed heavily on her mind was how careless she was with her relationship with Ashildr. Clara didn't like to think about it too much, because frankly, it was so complicated and confusing that it made her head hurt. Of course she was the one who made it the most confusing, not Ashildr. Clara would brush her off and act extremely unpredictably one minute, and then shower her with affection the next.

The problem was that Clara _wouldn't_ think about it. She'd just act and not worry about how she was treating the other immortal. They shouldn't even really be as intimate as they are, she knew in the back of her mind. Clara would be gone soon and getting too involved as she was more and more every day would just make it harder to face the raven. She cared about Ash, of course she did. It just wasn't practical of her to be doing what they were doing. Ash understood that too, it was obvious to both of them. Maybe they should talk about it. Maybe once they get the book and are out safely.

Her guilt wasn't rational, she had nothing to be guilty about. It wasn't like it was anything serious, and both of them knew that. Besides, Clara loved Danny.

She found what she was looking for in what appeared to be a boiler room. 21:12. Blueprints and notes about the fortress lay in a disorganized mess on a desk in the corner. Pictures of it's construction and writings in Gallifreyan were what took up most of the space, but there was also a big map of the place. It took a moment for Clara to tell what was what on the map, like which floor was which and where they'd agreed Ashildr would be.

The spot that Ash was after however was as clear as day to locate. The lines on the graph paper were different than all the others, thicker, and there were clear barricades inside the walls. It was in the center of the castle just as Ash said it would be.

Clara couldn't read the words written, that was their entire problem. She could however look at all the pictures, and from what she saw this castle really had been built entirely to protect the one book. It seemed strange, because of just how huge the fortress was. No guards, either. In everything Ash has read they're had been to mention of anyone guarding the place. Clara thought that was weird for how big it was and how paranoid the time lords were to leave the castle completely unattended.

At least she'd found the map quickly. _'Ok, I've got the blueprints. Can you describe where you are so I can figure out your whereabouts on the map?'_ Clara lay the large blue paper over everything else on the desk and leaned into her palms on top of it.

' _I'm in a hallway. There's a window to my left, a turn that I just took behind me, and three doors in a row up ahead on my right. Does that help?'_ Ash told her briskly, clearly awaiting direction.

' _Yes. Perfect. It's just up ahead. Then two lefts and it's the door that's way more scary than all the others.'_ Class traced the path that Ash would have to take with her finger. It would probably take her about three minutes, then she could get out just before the power went back on.

' _Ok, gotcha. I'll grab the dictionary and see you at the TARDIS.'_ Clara got the impression that their conversation was done and they needn't say more. Now that her job was done she could go. She stuffed the map in her pocket just in case either of them got turned around on the way out.

Just when she was about to leave, a photo caught her eye. It was of the front of the base when it was all lit up with its usual lights. It looked like the base had just been built. The year said 6789, which if she was remembering correctly, was about eighty years ago from when she was now. The base had defended the dictionary all that time, and now Ashildr and Clara were going to take it like candy from a baby. Perhaps the time lords should have posted actual guards after all.

She smiled at the picture, looking over it one last time. The fortress looked so different when it was new with lights, but still there was no one in the photo to pose with the newly built castle. No guards, nothing but stone walls and statues. ...Statues.

Clara squinted at the picture. They were small, but she could just make out what looked like two gargoyles sitting on the top of each of the great towers on the corners of the building. There were more pictures from the same year, a few from different angles. She studied them as well, they all had the statues.

Those definitely hadn't been on the castle when Clara had seen it from the outside just minutes ago. She pressed the side of the sonic sunglasses to enhance the image, and when she saw what it was her eyes widened. The statues were not gargoyles at all. They were angels. Weeping angels. Two very real, very scary, angels standing on the castle she was now standing in. Angels that hadn't been at their posts when she was outside the castle. That was definitely not good.

* * *

Just like Clara had said, the book was behind a great big steal door. It sat on a pedestal in the center of a small room that had little else in it. It almost looked lonely sitting like that.

It's room looked surprisingly unlike the rest of the fortress's interior in that it actually looked like a scene from a castle. The walls appeared to be the same cobble stone as the exterior walls of the fortress, and there were torches on the them that burned despite the fact that there was clearly no one around who could have lit them.

Beside the torches were beautiful tapestries made with purples and reds that showed images of Gallifrey in all its glory. There was even a suit of armour that stood proudly with a sword in hand next to statues of heroes and timelords in their silly hats.

The dictionary didn't look altogether very different from Ashildr's life journals, she supposed. It must also be bigger on the inside, being TimeLord and all. The distinction was that it was bound with a beautiful gold buckle engraved with a symbol in Gallifreyan and the words 'book of translation' written in Latin below it.

Ash walked up and lifted it gently, still wary that some security would detect it's absence just like in India Jones, a movie Clara had just made her watch with her in the TARDIS theatre.

Nothing did happen when she held it in her arms, though. No walls began to close in, no snakes fell from the sky or were let out of a secret hiding place, and no giant ball of stone was released to roll down a track and squish her. Rather disappointing, really.

Tucking the book under her arm, Ash took one last look at the regal room and then turned on her heel to go. Her watch read 21:19. The eclipse would be over soon and then it was just a matter of minutes before the power came back on. Ashildr left the room, passing a statue of a woman with wings holding her hands up to her face to cover her sobbing expression.


End file.
